> If in fact the statement by dcurtis is the first efflorescence of the problem, your line of thinking would reject it anyway.

This is true, but we have to take it in context. How likely is it that this is the policy, and we’ve never heard about it before now?

The card has been our for a couple of years. Millions of people are using it. This implies 10s of millions of payments. At a conservative estimate this would mean there must have been thousands of missed payments, and therefore thousands of locked Apple accounts.

It therefore seems unlikely we wouldn’t have heard about it. I could of course be wrong as could the GP, because this is just a probability estimate. But that’s all the GP is saying.