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Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

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Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#351

Post by egorfine »

hamdingers wrote: post #143
Apreche wrote: post #18

The real problem is that companies do not offer any accessible, powerful, and intelligent customer support. Even if they have real humans to talk to, they simply follow a script. Those agents do not have the ability to investigate a situation or the power to use their discretion to take meaningful action. We should impose, by law, the following rules on all companies that offer accounts to their customers. 1. If they…

I previously worked in fraud/risk at a major ecommerce platform. On my biggest day I closed 60,000 accounts. In one day. I knew other agents who'd done 10x that. The scale of this work is unfathomable to those who have only been on the consumer side of it. #1 is doable but would destroy our ability to combat fraud. "Here's how not to get banned next time" is not an email anyone in this space would consider sending. #…

Yeah, I managed a major service back in the day and I can confirm all you say is absolutely correct (except maybe #3, but that's legal).

One thing I do not understand however is why wouldn't companies offer paid appeal process perhaps with refund in case the termination decision is indeed overturned. I would gladly pay $100 to have my Apple/Google/etc account properly reviewed in order to get it back once it is inevitably flagged by yet another AI. Seems like win-win all around.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#352

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

immibis wrote: post #186
Apreche wrote: post #18

The real problem is that companies do not offer any accessible, powerful, and intelligent customer support. Even if they have real humans to talk to, they simply follow a script. Those agents do not have the ability to investigate a situation or the power to use their discretion to take meaningful action. We should impose, by law, the following rules on all companies that offer accounts to their customers. 1. If they…

Their customer support is to sue them. Few are willing to dare. But I suspect if you sued Apple over the gift card incident in a European country, the judge would side with you because of stronger consumer protection laws. Also that clause in the ToS that says you won't sue them is legally meaningless. If this happens more than a few times, they will quickly remember why customer support is necessary.

> the judge would side with you

The judge would likely never see the case, because the legal department would make sure it gets escalated to someone who can unfuck the problem before it gets that far.

Suing companies can legitimately be the easiest way to resolve issues, especially where small claims courts exist: It turns the issue into something that they can't "resolve" (for themselves) simply by ignoring and stonewalling you, so it becomes cheaper to actually fix the issue.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#353

Post by arcfour »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #349
arcfour wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are suggesting that companies be legally required to staff a "Complaint Bureau" where low-level employees must face, in person, the most disgruntled and potentially unstable 1% of the internet. This can only end well.

That actually sounds good to me. If this place attracts violence, the company can afford bulletproof glass and an alarm button that alerts the police, and I'd rather have the unstable 1% remanded to police at the risk and cost of a rich company than to have them stab a rando on the street later. Employee protection laws that mandate said bulletproof glass in certain situations already exist in civilized countries.

...for a Gmail account. Right.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#354

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

logifail wrote: post #278

I suspect the underlying problem is that the gap between legitimate use of gift cards and fraudulent use of gift cards is just not very large... Years ago I briefly played around with "manufactured spend" (on credit cards, to earn frequent flyer miles). There was one specific loophole, with one specific gift card provider, and it was a doozy. You could earn credit card points on spend, plus supermarket loyalty points…

> but it would take some time to explain exactly why not...

Not really:

"I'm churning credit cards for the rewards points. Here is the receipts where I use $10k from account A to purchase $10k worth of gift cards. Here is the statements where I deposit $10k of gift cards into account B. Here is the statement for the $10k wire from B to A. And here are the receipts for the next round of gift cards I purchased. Any further questions? I have $10k of gift cards to redeem."

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#355

Post by bigyabai »

crazygringo wrote: post #276
bigyabai wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No Way To Fix This" Claims Only Digital Ecosystem Where Catastrophic Lockout Regularly Happens

I know the headline you're referencing, but "only digital ecosystem"? I'm pretty sure accounts getting blocked is an issue with all of them. So I don't know what point you're trying to make. It's certainly not like Google is known to be any better.

Google's digital ecosystem doesn't doctrinally prevent owners from installing software or reflashing bricked hardware. Their OEM might, but iOS is the only smartphone ecosystem I've seen that enforces it universally.

But hey, at least Apple's universal lockout capability is able to deter theft! Every non-negotiable backdoor has a silver lining.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#356

Post by IshKebab »

vablings wrote: post #332
IshKebab wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sadly, the real issue here is with the banks and the payment processors I disagree. The issue is these huge platforms can arbitrarily ban people and consumers have no recourse. This sort of thing wasn't really possible before the internet age. We need new laws to deal with it. Banks are nothing to do with this. You could have your Steam/Google/Apple/etc. account summarily executed for any reason; it doesn't have to…

> This sort of thing wasn't really possible before the internet age. We need new laws to deal with it. Yes, it was and it always has been[1] >I disagree. The issue is these huge platforms can arbitrarily ban people and consumers have no recourse This is par for course with every single EULA ever. I will say in the case of Steam it's hard pressed to find your account completely disabled and unable to play the games yo…

Redlining is not really the same as what we're talking about (but should also be illegal).

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#357

Post by autoexec »

cogogo wrote: post #306
autoexec wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real wisdom to take away from this is that you need to keep copies of everything you've ever entrusted to iCloud because iCloud cannot be trusted. This was one instance where a giftcard seems to have caused someone to lose access to their stuff, but there's nothing stopping some other random thing fully outside of your control from causing Apple to kick you out of the things you've given them to keep for you. Eve…

I agree with this but I am not sure the personal risk of loss is very high with Apple. It is real but is it even on the same order of magnitude of losing your family photos in a house fire 30yrs ago? I used to keep a disk in a safe deposit box with my pics but got lazy. Is that good practice or paranoia?

Seems like good practice to me to keep digital backups in your safe deposit box. Probably a good idea to check/refresh them every couple years too. When it comes to things like house fires and getting screwed by cloud providers everybody thinks that it can never happen to them even when examples of it happening to others exist. The important thing to make sure that you're covered in the event that the rare but catastrophic event does occur. Especially when the cost of doing so is so low. For back ups it amounts to little more than a thumb drive and a visit to your bank every couple years.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#358

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

arcfour wrote: post #353
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That actually sounds good to me. If this place attracts violence, the company can afford bulletproof glass and an alarm button that alerts the police, and I'd rather have the unstable 1% remanded to police at the risk and cost of a rich company than to have them stab a rando on the street later. Employee protection laws that mandate said bulletproof glass in certain situations already exist in civilized countries.

...for a Gmail account. Right.

No, for the key to being able to participate in modern society. Without a Google account, you can't use (standard) Android. Without either (standard) Android or iOS, you de facto can't use most banks, some public transit networks, and various other utility-level services.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#359

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

ryandrake wrote: post #56
estimator7292 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banks frequently completely freeze accounts for no discernable reason and with zero communication, support, or recourse. You're just lucky that it hasn't happened to you. That does not mean it doesn't happen to anyone.

What I want to know is why does it always have to go straight from 0 to 100? There's seemingly no concept of proportion. For most online services, your account can be in one of two states: Totally good and "banned for life". There's no warning, no investigative period, no concept of scale (was the fraud $10 or $10,000?), no way to serve your time and come back if you actually were bad. It's just instant, silent BAN H…

Because it's easier for the companies and there is no (serious enough) downside to doing it this way.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#360

Post by isodev »

array_key_first wrote: post #293
astrange wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Harvesting user data" doesn't make money. The reason people think this is that on HN people have main character syndrome that makes them think their personal data is interesting, plus an assumption that making money is evil therefore anything you can think of that is evil would make money. (Google and Facebook don't make money by "harvesting" or "selling" user data, they make webpages you spend a lot of time on then…

Pretty much nobody's personal info is valuable by itself, but it's EXTREMELY valuable in aggregate, because it lets you target advertisement. Like, so valuable it's on the order of tens of billions.

Indeed, and the entire concept of smarter Siri, chatGPT integration as well as apple's ever-increasing Ad surfaces ... is powered by aggegading more and more usage analytics from users. There are so many that come on by default when you install macOS/iOS.
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