Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–479 of 479 posts

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#471

Post by Obscurity4340 »

pxeboot wrote: post #324
Obscurity4340 wrote: post #168

They also need to let you transfer your purchases to a new AppleID under a new enail address. It is outrageous you're forced to choose between all your purchases from an email account name from when you were a kid or teen and getting to have an adult email address/handle and not having a data hungry company like Google or Microsoft seeing all your Apple activity in perpetuity

Apple does provide a way to transfer purchases to a different account you control [1]. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/117267

Can you do that and get rid of the other/original account?

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#472

Post by gpvos »

miki123211 wrote: post #386
srmatto wrote: post #10

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…

Or we could, you know, restructure our economy so that we don't have huge semi-monopolies anymore. I know, not going to happen, but one can dream.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#473

Post by Terretta »

xp84 wrote: post #133
DannyPage wrote: post #14

> 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…

Banks can’t legally just take your money and lock you out permanently. There are some actual regulations. Plus they have a proper handle on your actual human identity, which means you ought to always have a route to going somewhere in person and proving you’re the rightful owner of your money. “Online” accounts have zero regulatory requirements, plus many of them aren’t necessarily directly paid-for, so they frame th…

> There are some actual regulations.

How's that CFPB thing going lately?

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#474

Post by benced »

asadotzler wrote: post #310
benced wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This legislation has high costs and while it seems fair to impose them on the Apples and Googles of the world, this gets weirder with smaller services that might have trouble complying. My podcast player, Overcast (overcast.fm), is one guy. Should he be subject to this? It seems like that business might not be able to exist if he was. You could do a revenue threshold or something but seems tricky.

The business size doesn't matter. Bake it into the business' books and charge what it takes to manage it. If you can't, your business isn't viable. If you can, it doesn't matter if you're 1 person, 100 people, or 1 million people.

I like that one guy can run a useful service to me.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#475

Post by qingcharles »

rationalist wrote: post #427
qingcharles wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normally I resolve these things by buying all the executive phone numbers and working my way through the phonebook, but Google is the one I've had no success on with this so far.

Any tips on how to do this? (Facebook in my case)

I've been using SignalHire the last couple of years since the other providers I was using got bought up. There are better companies though, they are just more expensive.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#476

Post by rationalist »

qingcharles wrote: post #475
rationalist wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any tips on how to do this? (Facebook in my case)

I've been using SignalHire the last couple of years since the other providers I was using got bought up. There are better companies though, they are just more expensive.

Thank you

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#477

Post by NetMageSCW »

gpvos wrote: post #472
miki123211 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Or we could, you know, restructure our economy so that we don't have huge semi-monopolies anymore. I know, not going to happen, but one can dream.

And then we would have health insurance and health care level problems with lots of things.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#478

Post by NetMageSCW »

stackskipton wrote: post #80
ryandrake wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As someone who worked in fraud, sometimes the $10 transaction is primer for 10k transaction that will really cost the company. When you don't know what's going on, you don't give a shit about end user and primary objective is prevent the company from losing money, shut it down and sort it out is easiest way. Furthermore, without physical presence where you could sit down with someone, this becomes more difficult to d…

If you don’t care about the end user, you should be fired, your manager should be fired, and your company should be shut down.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#479

Post by efreak »

mariusor wrote: post #124
ndriscoll wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could buy from a provider that advertises non-use of DRM like GOG, or on Steam, it lists third party DRM, so you can know whether you have the tools to remove it (and whether you have the tools to remove Steam's DRM, or whether the game appears on a web list of games that don't use any DRM). You could also refund it if you can't verify you're able to successfully back it up and run the backup on a computer or use…

Why do you think it's different with GOG? Both GOG and Steam allow you to use local copies of games, and both would deny you access to your account to download more games once banned. Steam allows you to install games without DRM from their platform.

When banned on steam, I believe you are still about to download and play your (offline) games.

My understanding is that your account is effectively made read-only (blocked from purchasing, community, etc) and not removed entirely. Steam's help article on restricted accounts[1] seems to agree with this, given the text description of account suspension implying that it's temporary or for legal reasons (because the account has been used for illegal activity, or to prevent the account's use until it can be restored to its owner in cases where a lock might not suffice)

Admittedly, I have no personal experience with this, nor do I even know anyone who does, but I've never heard of anyone complaining about being unable to play their existing library when banned; complaints about steam tend to be about accounts being stolen and VAC/community bans, with the occasional complaint from someone I know that lost access to an account when they lost their email address and forgot the password (this was before steam had account limitations and steamguard, and they had never bought anything).

[1]: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4F62-35F9-F395-5C...

Post reply on HN