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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

#931

Post by abigail95 »

andy_ppp wrote: post #923
abigail95 wrote: post #917

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you sure this is available in the UK or US? I’m pretty sure all the legal agreements you sign when joining say the decisions of Amazon or YouTube or Facebook are final so are these Terms illegal?

You can file a claim for whatever you want in a court. You have a much higher chance of winning if your claim involves something like you paid a company for a service and they didn't give you it - and now you have damages.

If the company says they have a contract with you where you agreed to this, that's not a very good defense against the Consumer Legal Remedies Act or the Unfair Competition Law, one or both of those provide statutory damages, these are California laws that get enforced every day. You find a Superior Court in CA, pay a few hundred dollars to file, and let Apple respond.

It would be the same story in the UK as it is in California or Australia.

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

#932

Post by DamonHD »

ursAxZA wrote: post #897
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…

Gift cards carry a surprisingly high fraud/AML risk. If a code ends up being part of a stolen-card → resale → redemption chain (which is more common than people think), companies like Apple may actually have to lock the entire account. So the trigger might not be arbitrary—it may just be a side effect of how risky gift-card-based payments are.

I spent a long time working in finance one way or another, including as a founder/director of a small e-money issuer, and I have at least from this time ASSUMED that gift cards carry a very inflated AML risk.

Plus I have no desire to carry scrip when I could have fungible cash or equivalent, so I would not buy a gift card. I have received a few.

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

#933

Post by mvanbaak »

wmertens wrote: post #920
markus_zhang wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

things that work better for you, might not work better for someone else.

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

#936

Post by ursAxZA »

DamonHD wrote: post #932
ursAxZA wrote: post #897

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gift cards carry a surprisingly high fraud/AML risk. If a code ends up being part of a stolen-card → resale → redemption chain (which is more common than people think), companies like Apple may actually have to lock the entire account. So the trigger might not be arbitrary—it may just be a side effect of how risky gift-card-based payments are.

I spent a long time working in finance one way or another, including as a founder/director of a small e-money issuer, and I have at least from this time ASSUMED that gift cards carry a very inflated AML risk. Plus I have no desire to carry scrip when I could have fungible cash or equivalent, so I would not buy a gift card. I have received a few.

I think you’re operating with the right mindset.

Looking at the linked story, the trigger seems to have come from redeeming a gift card bought at a major retailer.

Even if the purchaser uses a legitimate store, the user can’t really know the full supply-chain history of a prepaid code, and that uncertainty alone creates room for unexpected flags.

For people who already have a credit card, gift cards are a fuzzy choice if the goal is simply to load balance onto an account.

Something somewhere in the chain probably tripped a rule — maybe fraud-related, maybe a processing anomaly — and from the outside it’s impossible for the user to see which.

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

#938

Post by xp84 »

econ wrote: post #904
pests wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you buy them in bulk for employees they get progressively cheaper. It also matters how many customers you can serve vs how many you have and what you spend to get one customer into your store. If you spend 500 per day to get 100 customers into your brick and mortar store you can also give/spend 500 in discounts to get 100 more. If only 60% redeems the card the other 40% is profit. ETC

Un-redeemed GC aren’t profit. You can’t book the revenue, rather the balances count as a liability (because you owe all the random cardholders valuable goods/services) and, at least in my state, after a certain period of inactivity, you’re obligated to give that money to the State as unclaimed property. Google “escheatment”

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

#939

Post by kibwen »

jama211 wrote: post #886
kibwen wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't have root access to your machine, it's not your machine. If you don't have root access to the machine your data is on, it's not your data.

And Linus himself mostly just stores data on the cloud. At the end of the day, practicality matters.

Sure, you can be as "practical" as you like, just as long as you don't come crying when Apple decides to revoke your access to their data. You accept the benefit, you accept the risk.

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

#940

Post by kirb »

heavyset_go wrote: post #840
Aurornis wrote: post #836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the "would you eat from a jar of M&M's where one is cyanide? well what if there are X x 1000 M&M's?" principle. This captures the Hacker News style misjudgment of risk very well. First, none of these issues are equivalent to eating cyanide in any way, shape, or form. The extreme melodrama of upgrading "someone's PayPal account was erroneously locked" to literally being poisoned to death is emblematic of the mi…

> First, none of these issues are equivalent to eating cyanide in any way, shape, or form. The extreme melodrama of upgrading "someone's PayPal account was erroneously locked" to literally being poisoned to death is emblematic of the misjudgment of risk going on. If you're a business, yes, PayPal locking your account and freezing your funds forever , which is what they do, is tantamount to legal grievous injury or de…

To my knowledge, PayPal does not hold funds “forever”. They penalise the account holder by locking it away for 180 days. At that point, they can withdraw the balance to a bank account. I have multiple friends and clients who had this happen to them, but in all cases, they were exposed to higher risk by accepting payments through donation forms, or a marketplace where they sell directly to customers. (Despite what feels like an anecdotal high failure rate, somehow I’ve never had an issue running my own marketplace for the past decade.)
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