431–440 of 479 posts
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charge 5$ for the ability to send your first iMessage. problem solved.
So now every fraudster with $5 appears legitimate? Remember blue check marks? The EU is not happy about those. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
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> This was the reason why free trade was removed from RuneScape back in the day and it wasn't even a Jagex issue. People would go to 3rd party gold selling websites and then pay for gold with stolen credit cards. They could easily keep the money because the trade cannot be reversed without a moderator and what they were doing was against the rules so everyone would just get banned. Gold farmers were paying for bot me…
It wasn't a blackmail scenario specifically Jagex got punished either way because the fraud was enabled by their platform. I don't have the time to check but I believe this was mentioned by the one of the Gower brothers in the runescape documentary. My broader point is that even if they cracked down on fraud which was absolutely not the fault of Jagex because of the poor security options at the time from Credit Card…
The RuneScape Documentary - 15 Years of Adventure
https://youtu.be/7RNK0YBdwko?si=sei69KmyL4hb_hj-&t=2944
Discussion begins at 49:04
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. #…
A core concept here is that of ownership. People think they own their accounts and data. Stories like these, and unfortunately the law, make it clear that they don't own anything. I personally think it is false advertising of companies to even hint at ownership. Words like 'buy' shouldn't be allowed since it implies owning. They should only be allowed to say 'rent' or 'grant a limited license'.
I would rather the law make it such that you really are buying , than codify that you own nothing. The ambiguity isn't great, on that we agree, but why would you weaken the citizen's standing to remove it?
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…
> it dawned on me that what I was doing was basically indistinguishable from money laundering. Of course it was NOT money laundering But it is money laundering, that's what manufacturing spend is. It's not money laundering to hide evidence of a crime, but it is money laundering for the purpose of hiding the fact that you didn't engage in commerce in the process of spending money on a credit card to earn a reward. It'…
Which law do you think was being broken? I think the person is pretty clearly not defrauding the bank. Maybe the credit card company doesn't like it, but they almost certainly don't have that in writing because if they'd considered this possibility, they wouldn't have allowed it to be possible in the first place.
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In the EU, banks are AFAIK banned from using SMS 2FA, and the 2FA needs to be tied to the specific transactions. Which nowadays de facto means a bank-specific (sometimes country-specific) 2FA app, possibly with the alternative option of purchasing a pricey dedicated 2FA device.
For the sake of completeness I will mention that one US bank that I use, Wells Fargo, issues the classic RSA keychain tokens: https://www.wellsfargo.com/biz/online-banking/securid/ ... which is quite simple and cheap ... and can be used in place of SMS 2FA. The fact that these tokens exist and are so simple to deploy and use really deflates any claim (by banks) that banking and/or auth apps are required. It causes on…
> Update 18 December 2025: We’re back! A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me, and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way (sounds like classic gift card tampering), and my account was caught by that. Obvi…
> 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…
As a sane person I would expect a mere popup saying "Voucher code was already redeemed. try another one" Nothing more.
The ONLY other thing I can currently think of why Apple straight away went to "criminal" would be that the brick and mortar store failed to activate the card when they sold it.
You know, someone shoplifts such a card thinking they got it made. Even though you'd think everybody should know that the code you scratch of that card is only active after the clerk at the register did his thing.
If Apple then receives this voucher code that they must have in their databases but it has a big "not activated flag" next to it, THEN I could start to believe why they would lock down the account that tried to redeem, it.
And even then it seems iffy. Because how should I as the consumer know if the clerk did everything right with the activation?
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…
It's almost a rhetorical question, isn't it? Clearly, from both the original post, and this reporting, they are NOT safe to redeem. In addition, it just re-emphasizes how tied we all are to these "digital lives". I used to do it without a blink, but now think twice before clicking "Login with Google/Apple".
Personally I only use these login buttons for throwaway accounts, if it's something important, I'll use email/password.
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the same way you should run _all_ proprietary binaries. restricted inside a sandbox. linux makes that easy with flatpaks.
Flatpaks would make it easy, if they ever worked when you needed them to.