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Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

hey.paris

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Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#751

Post by nullfield »

viraptor wrote: post #265
stavros wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would make more sense to stop offering gift cards, which make zero financial sense for the consumer, but why stop offering a lucrative product that people buy because they're bad at logic, when you can just shut down accounts and greatly inconvenience people at no cost to you?

> which make zero financial sense for the consumer Not in all situations. Because of various cross promotions between car insurance, supermarket and airlines, by using gift cards for groceries I get an effective ~9% discount every time. That really adds up over a year. For Apple and others, you can use secondary gift card market to get some discounts too, if you wanna risk it.

What kinds of stacked cross-promotions like this exist, and even work out financially for everyone?

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#752

Post by DamonHD »

Rikudou wrote: post #69
b112 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The broken logic is that it will expose why the account was flagged, and thus, allow 'bad actors' to better navigate and bypass such flags. Of course, this is absolutely silly and beyond absurd, for bad actors share information of forums, can deduce fairly easily, and even have help from people on staff. Such actors typically know about detection and flagging methods within days of implementation. There's literally z…

You can use an Android phone without a Google account.

I do.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#753

Post by dtt101 »

My partner was locked out by Apple last year during a password/device change gone awry. Two weeks and we finally got through to someone competent who fixed it. At one point it looked as though we would lose many of the videos of our son growing up.

Since then I have been removing myself from the ecosystem - my email is from hey, file sync on Dropbox, obsidian for notes, whatsapp for messages. Sometimes it doesn’t feel as joined up, mostly it is way better.

Moved to framework computers + omarchy last month and am not looking back.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#754

Post by cedws »

x3sphere wrote: post #32

It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this. What's the rationale? It would make more sense if they just locked the person out of redeeming gift cards or something, not the entire account. But reading horror stories like this is is why I only use the very bare minimum of any of these cloud services. Keep local copies of everything. For developer accounts, I always create them under a separate email…

Apple is perfectly happy to take money from criminals though. My grandmother bought some Apple gift cards from a supermarket which turned out to be fake. The cards on display had been replaced/modified in a way that upon purchasing them it activated another card held by the criminals. Apple refused to take responsibility and so did the supermarket. Gift cards are loved by scammers as a way to receive and launder money, they should be subject to much more scrutiny and have stronger AML mechanisms.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#755

Post by ljlolel »

mike_ivanov wrote: post #748
HumblyTossed wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lot of arrogant people here who think they are safe and better than anybody and blame OP. You see this a lot in the Apple "community". Apple can _never_ do wrong. Apple can _never_ make a mistake. Apple's choices are _always_ the best choices. I don't understand why people put corporations on pedestals.

Corporations play the role of gods in our society. edit: about the same role as Greek or Roman gods.

Equal chance of them replying to your prayers and offerings

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#756

Post by lrvick »

You do not own your apple account, and you never did. I would take this as a chance to learn about digital sovereignty and self hosting where you control your own data so this never happens again.

Google and Apple can and will delete your content at any time for any reason and there is no appeals court.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#758

Post by totallymike »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #735
ethbr1 wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The root issue/risk is from cascading service dependencies, and I'm 99% sure this is done unintentionally at Apple et al. Team builds service. Service depends on first party identity/authentication because it's easier. ... Fast forward 20 years, and no one at platform company even understands the dependency graph from a customer perspective anymore. Especially in the case of rare events like account locks. Consequent…

Honestly it seems like nobody under this entire post has actually fully read the TOS for any Apple service. I have once for iCloud... and the impression I got was that they must think close to 100% of the population on Earth are potential scoundrels for them to put in so many clauses and escape hatches. I don’t think it’s possible to fully read any modern TOS from a bigco and not get an inkling of that. The real issu…

At Apple’s scale, the likelihood of someone pulling any weird or shady nonsense that can be imagined is not potential, it’s eventual.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#759

Post by viraptor »

nullfield wrote: post #751
viraptor wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which make zero financial sense for the consumer Not in all situations. Because of various cross promotions between car insurance, supermarket and airlines, by using gift cards for groceries I get an effective ~9% discount every time. That really adds up over a year. For Apple and others, you can use secondary gift card market to get some discounts too, if you wanna risk it.

What kinds of stacked cross-promotions like this exist, and even work out financially for everyone?

I don't think they'd work out if everyone used them. It's essentially companies paying for your shopping data. But a) they overpay to incentivise you, b) I'm buying the same boring things on rotation so it's close to useless to them.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#760

Post by pests »

nullfield wrote: post #683
ryandrake wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "gift card" in general is an anachronism whose time has passed. They have got to go. If companies are going to consider use of gift cards as red flags (as they often are, due to their being key components in money laundering and scams), then society should just abandon them. They are worse in every way than a prepaid credit cards, and in most cases where you want to give someone a gift card, you should probably j…

The only “use cases” I’ve seen are discount or niche. For example, Target and Bass Pro Shops/Cabelas in the US both offered some kind of 5 or 10 percent back/discount around Black Friday on gift cards. Niche would fall into, generally, some small enough business that these messes aren’t likely to happen, where the point of the gift is specifically later-consumption, like a local coffee place that you know someone lov…

I used to buy a gift card every ~week at a local sandwich place near where I worked and ate at every day. Their deal was a free meal (sandwich, chips, drink) with a $50 gift card purchase. Then I'd just pay with the card until it ran out.
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