401–410 of 479 posts
They did The Right Thing™ which was to honor them, so that their reputation and brand were preserved.
lots of other examples, like new coke fiasco, the poisoned tylenol, etc...
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Then they are free to stop offering gift cards.
Or/and, as an alternative, per the man from Singapore, stop using 3rd parties to distribute gift card codes.
I don’t want to minimize the pain people experience here, but it’s worth calling out just how hard this problem is for retailers and issuers. Gift cards are the #1 fraud vector in payments ... because it lets stolen cards be converted into a cash-like equivalent with zero traceability. So fraud/risk system are highly sensitive to gift cards. It's not an excuse, but I see in this thread people minimizing the problem a…
Workaround I've experienced in practice: some stores only allow purchasing gift cards with cash. This doesn't allow online-only gift card purchases, so it's not a full solution, just a workaround.
Dumb people were being scammed in Singapore, until the financial regulator here clamped down on gift cards altogether. It used to be trivial to buy Apple, Google, and Steam gift cards in Singapore convenience stores. They're no longer being sold anywhere.
I'm not sure how requiring gift cards to be bought with cash would help prevent that
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> 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 send…
> > #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. > Just imagine laws would work that way. This is how "tipping off" law often works in practice. As a support agent you often lack full visibility into the treatment or history of the person on the other end of the phone, especially if they're a bad actor…
I don't know what you mean by "tipping off" laws mean, but certainly if you get given a penalty in law (e.g. you get judged in court), you will be told what you have done wrong, and shown proof of it.
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> 1) Why would redeeming a bad gift card result in a complete shut-down of the account? Because they assume you stole the gift card and are therefore a criminal. As to why they're making the assumption that you are the criminal, not the actual criminal who successfully redeemed the gift card first, you've got me. Since either situation is possible. > 2) Why is it seemingly impossible to get any support now unless you…
"No Way To Fix This" Claims Only Digital Ecosystem Where Catastrophic Lockout Regularly Happens
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Can you provide any insight into the logic of closing an account that tries to activate an already redeemed gift card? I’ve tried to come up with some strawman explanation but I can’t see it.
Since you asked I will share some wild speculation, but to be clear I don't know how Apple's fraud prevention works. Gift cards are the currency of modern confidence scams. Accounts that redeem a lot of high value gift cards are suspect for that reason alone. Buttfield-Addison makes it sound like this is common practice for him, so his account may have been on a shitlist already. Apple may be so sensitive they'd clos…
I could see doing a lot of card redemptions as a flag, but then I think the next step is "what are they spending the credits on?" I could see a scam where you launder cash by turning it into cards, and then buying shitty and expensive apps. Thus paying apple 30% to clean money for you.
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There are apparently large amounts of NEW gift card scams going around; Target has recently changed how they work and I've heard other reports. Frankly, staying away from gift cards seems the best option unless it's blast radius can be limited (e.g., redeemed in person).
But that basically screws over loyal Apple customers who trade in an entire family’s worth of iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, Macbooks, etc over the years. Sometimes you just take a giftcard because you don’t want to buy a new thing. Fast forward a couple of years, you basically learn that you traded in your Macbook Pro for nothing. How’s that not a controversy? Perhaps they should give customers non-transferable stor…
Throw in gift cards all over the place to incentivize purchases.
Go to use a gift card, "Sorry, gift cards can only be used to pay for full price items, not discounted or sale items".
Conveniently, effectively everything in the store is discounted or on sale.
That would be bad enough as-is. But you move houses, or are moving out for the first time, and someone buys you a gift card, with CASH?
They're the same gift cards. And the same "rules" which are nowhere to be found, just you arguing until you're blue in the face with a store manager who "understands, but policy".
"I could have bought this item with the cash it took to buy the gift card, but because that cash 'changed form', it's now unacceptable for payment?"
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I wasn't using it for much so I just took it as a warning I should get off my ass and de google. ... which hasn't happened, but maybe once every 3 months I move another service to logging in with an email on my personal domain ...
I recently ran into a situation where a service I absolutely must use and has no alternative (think government provided service) would only accept a Gmail domain for registration. Any other domain would fail registration with no useful error message. This really shouldn't be allowed in this day and age but I'm effectively powerless to change it. DeGoogling is hard.
This fiasco stirs up a lot of different topics for me, none of which seem like they are likely to be resolved anytime soon. First, with so much importance placed on an Apple/iCloud account in our current era it's not good that they can be shutdown so trivially. Someone can be shut out from using Messages, Apple Wallet, Digital Identification (depending on where they live) and all their subscriptions and media purchas…
To put this as plainly as I possibly can: 1. It is objectively true that Apple and Google accounts are extremely important to many people. 2. It is also objectively true that most users will only need one of each, a few at most. Fraudsters have no such limitations, and may want to create thousands of them per day if the possibility arises. 3. Therefore, it's likely that a significant percentage of all accounts ever c…