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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

#911

Post by SandyAndyPerth »

Aurornis wrote: post #481
jasode wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this. It's also the buying of gift cards that can get Apple accounts locked: https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/r8b1lu/apple_will_pe... If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people will learn to never buy/redeem Apple gift cards because of the real possibility of account bans. - Don't give Apple gift cards to family and friends: You're potenti…

I skimmed some of the comments from that giant Reddit thread. A lot of people responded that they’ve been buying even more Apple gift cards without problem. One commonality among the stories in that thread from people who had problems was either switching their App Store country or using their App Store account primarily from a different country than the setting.

Well-spotted.

That includes the original poster! "could have been because I purchased gift cards from the US (online) and added them to my account while I was in Mexico, or I was using a VPN while adding gift cards"

One of the other people was someone who "purchased $2k in apple gift cards from target during Black Friday deals... There was a limit of 1 but if you went in store and were friendly to the cashier a lot of people (myself included) had luck getting them to ring them up as separate transactions".

Pretty sure if the latter person had given those out as separate cards to other people it would have been fine but going from "limit of 1" to "all redeemed by same account" is unsurprising when it triggers a fraud flag.

The big problem in this story as in the past one is the apparent lack of sensible escalation.

I've heard horror stories from Google devs that it's even worse - such a situation follows you for life even if you try to setup new accounts.

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

#913

Post by generic92034 »

Aurornis wrote: post #487
generic92034 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people will learn to never buy/redeem Apple gift cards because of the real possibility of account bans. If you are trying to be a bad person you could weaponize that approach. You do not like person x, send them some Apple gift cards... :o

> You do not like person x, send them some Apple gift cards... :o 99.999% chance they happily redeem them and go about their lives. These stories, while frustrating, are clearly edge cases. Yes I know you can find more if you search social media, but I don’t think a lot of these HN commenters realize the volume of gift cards Apple sells and redeems without problem every day.

Maybe that hypothetical, bad person needs to find out what is triggering the account locking, first. Many small sums per gift card? A sum over a certain threshold? The point is, in reality it will not be up to pure chance.

However, I personally would not do that anyway.

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

#914

Post by abawany »

gond wrote: post #781
andreashaerter wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of the self-hosted solutions are also just way less smooth to use than the built-in integration iCloud or Google Drive gives with devices. The built-in integrations (iCloud, Google Drive) are smooth right up until you’re locked out or forced into changes you can't control. Obviously. There is a middle ground though: managed service providers (per-service). You don't have to self-host everything in your basement…

Can you give an example? I am looking for a way out. I kind of self hosted for decades on a virtual server until I couldn’t keep up with it. So much stuff broke something in the stack, bringing the server down. Often, I had to initiate a full lock down on everything before going up again, consuming a day’s effort or two.

Hetzner offers managed nextcloud and storage instances.

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

#915

Post by abigail95 »

e28eta wrote: post #653
bragr wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experiences with people at Apple, everyone seems so siloed that it doesn't surprise me that they couldn't help him. It doesn't seem like they have the culture where you could just drop by the Apple fraud team and ask for help for a friend.

Or, they hit the brick wall that is US anti-money laundering laws. It’s illegal to “tip off” (warn) the person if they’ve tripped the AML checks. At that point, it doesn’t matter how many friends you have on the inside, unless you’ve got one that’s ignorant of the law or willing to risk the penalties.

Apple isn't filing SARs - they want no business in that and have banking partners to do that for them.

AML is a concept not a law itself. Which law is forcing Apple to act like this?

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

#916

Post by abigail95 »

idk1 wrote: post #902

There really should be a law around being able to access and review locked accounts. I've seen so many cases of people just losing their digital lives because of an automated system.

Regular old contract law will handle this fine. State a claim to a court and let Apple respond to it. It's not beyond the reach of the author to do this.

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

#917

Post by abigail95 »

andy_ppp wrote: post #404
iambateman wrote: post #401

My grandfather’s Apple account was blacklisted too but I was less sympathetic to him because he genuinely sends spam email from his personal account (it’s politically motivated). One day he was bricked from his accounts because he ran afoul of Apple’s ToS. The problem then was I couldn’t feel sure that he hadn’t actually done something which a reasonable person would say should result in account closure. Paris’s case…

There should be a legal right to a clear explanation and a mechanism of appealing these decisions with an external organisation. I think it’s unreasonable to expect that they should be able to delete users this casually with everything that is tied to your devices. You could make it so costs for arbitration could be paid up front by the person appealing and then if the account deletion was deemed wrong the company re…

We have these systems - they are called courts. The subject is in Australia and so am I, I can file a case up to around $100k USD for $150 in filing fees.

If Apple doesn't respond they will lose by default and possibly be held in contempt.

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

#918

Post by flas9sd »

andreashaerter wrote: post #684

I don't get the mostly black/white "Self-host" vs. "Mega-Corp" discussions as there is a middle ground: smaller managed service providers (even: per-service). You don't have to self-host everything in your basement, and you don't have to hand your entire digital life to Google or Apple either. Mail, CalDAV/CardDAV, Immich, Nextcloud, OpenCloud, OpenTalk, web hosting, Kubernetes, simple VMs.. whatever ... fully manage…

maybe for the business target audience, but I doubt this can be a thing for the majority of users. They just want to get on with their day, not learn magic words to search for and relate to each other.

As for Apple fans, they specifically seek the vertical integration.

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

#919

Post by citrin_ru »

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…

No to excuse Apple but I think anti money laundering laws are at least partially to blame - they vary from country to country but typically impose penalties for not blocking suspicious activity at the same shielding from lawsuits for blocking innocent users. It's like lawmakers found a way to throw due process out of the window.

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

#920

Post by wmertens »

markus_zhang wrote: post #611
quinncom wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the author of that Reddit post. I should probably update it to clarify that I didn’t just purchase the gift cards, but also redeemed them. I don’t think it was purchasing them that triggered the lock on my Apple account. I mean, after all, how would they know what my Apple account is until they’re redeemed?

My recommendation is to completely drop the Apple ecosystem, however painful it is. I do use an iPhone but I treat it as just a phone. If Apple locks me out I dgaf.

Why even bother with apple at that point. There are so many better and/or cheaper Android phones out there
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