461–470 of 479 posts
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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.
Banks are well regulated and will face meaningful consequences for getting this wrong with any regularity.
> 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…
Why the fuck couldn't it just be that you forgot and tried to redeem twice?
Just reject the card and be done with it, no action required.
Apple does not dispute they locked this man’s entire digital life without recourse because he suffered a fraud, and he only recovered because famous people intervened. You’d be insane to risk that.
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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…
Still, with Point 1) I wonder what exactly was happening. To think straight away "suspected fraud/criminal activity" for merely entering a voucher code a second time? 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 fail…
But this breaks down for the reasons described, that thieves get the code before you do and manage to spend it first once the cashier activates it but before you get home and actually use it.
So maybe that's new and Apple hasn't updated their scam detection logic? It's the only thing I can think of.
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Ashley Home Furniture is an expert at this. 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 gi…
Diabolical.
A law that states you can't call it a "gift card" unless it can be exchanged for cash at 95 cents on the dollar would fix it pretty well.
Related: there is a known scam where someone will ask for payment by things like Ebay gift cards. To "prove you have the card", you are asked to read off just the last few digits of the card - which unbeknownst to the intended victim is actually all that is needed to redeem the card. You can reliably reconstruct a SSN that is missing the first digits, if you know where the person lived when they filed for it, but tha…
> Related: there is a known scam where someone will ask for payment by things like Ebay gift cards. To "prove you have the card", you are asked to read off just the last few digits of the card - which unbeknownst to the intended victim is actually all that is needed to redeem the card. I'm not following. If things have gotten this far, the victim has already been duped into buying the card and intends to send it to t…
Yes, the mark has essentially fallen for the scam, but not yet arrived for the goods... which don't actually exist.
> But also, how could the card possibly work that way? What are the other digits even for; and wouldn't they quickly run out of valid "last few digit" combinations for issued cards?
Exactly why I hate that Ebay uses their insipid coding schema. I'm not explaining why they do it, because I can't.
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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.
(You need it for music to fulfill your contracts with the artists though.)
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At least use a service with actual customer support like Fastmail, and backup your email with an email client that downloads copies of your email to your computer.
I mean Proton seems like a good (although extremely expensive) option, but these small companies could go out of business on a dime which is a problem when the effort to switch is a titanic undertaking.
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None of this prevents them from providing proper customer service that can resolve cases of false positives.
It is kind of astonishing to me that the entire chain of logic was put together without "The company could invest in better customer service to resolve disputed identity" as a third possibility. It was certainly my first priority for an e-mail provider when I started to de-Google my life.
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And also it would be good to limit the ban duration with a law. For example manslaughter can be 5 years in prison. So if google decide to ban your account because you send your doctor a photo of your son for medical purposes, they are not allowed to ban you for more than 5 years and then they must restore full access to your account.
How about, if they ban someone, they must give their evidence to the government to prosecute the alleged crime, and if the government refuses (within X time) or loses, then the account is restored.