Apple user permabanned, loses $1.2K in App Store goods for legit gift card buys | Hacker News Reader

Apple user permabanned, loses $1.2K in App Store goods for legit gift card buys

twitter.com

136 pointswaffle_ss55 comments

"Nobody at Apple can unblock your account"

=> You're a-holes.

I can understand that Apple has to deal with a lot of fraud and so they need to proactively flag and ban accounts. But all these accounts are still mutable electronic records. If he moves, changes his email, or changes his name (e.g. marriage) they can update the account to the new reality just fine. So there's nothing preventing Apple from renaming his old account to get it out of the way, then creating a new account with the same data, then re-associating his previous app and music purchases to that new account. Will that involve costly manual work? Probably. But is it possible? Definitely.

What they effectively did here is they screwed up (that part is OK) and now they are trying to weasel out of the consequences (that part is bad) while simultaneously insulting their customer's intelligence by pretending that "expensive to them" equals "impossible" (that part is evil).

Imagine if you walk into an Apple Store, accidentally drop one of their $1000 laptops on the floor so it breaks, and then pretend that it's Apple's fault and refuse to pay for the damage. They'll sue the sh-t out of you. This is kinda the same situation in reverse. They are probably hoping that he won't lawyer up because he's a fanboy. But he should. Corporations need legally binding feedback or else his once favorite company will gradually rot from its core until he can eventually not enjoy using them anymore.

I imagine, "Nobody at Apple can unblock your account" simply means that they don't have a standart procedure or person with privilege to unlock the account.

If that was a small company, you surely can have an engineer to change a record in a database to sort things out but in large companies you usually don't have raw access to data and instead you have procedures that were designed in coordination with multiple departments within the organisation. I.E., if you change something directly on a database, things can get messy at legal, fraud prevention, billing, compliance, security and who knows where else because it's possible that they have a system in place where all these different departments are kept in sync through actions taken through higher level interfaces and if data is accessed directly corruption happens.

I don't know anything specific about Apple but in my experience big organisations have huge bureaucracy in form of management software build by Oracle, SAP, Microsoft etc.

It tends not to be a simple MySQL table where you have the accounts, maybe they will need to remove flags for the account activity on multiple departments so that the systems won't lock the account again and simply they don't have a procedure in place for that.

But, escalate it high enough, and the person who writes procedures can make it happen. Or to put it another way, this isn't a problem that's going to happen to Tim Cook's best friend since high school, for instance.

Of course I have no idea how it is in reality for Apple but if it happens that they don't have a procedure in place to fix this already, it could easily mean that someone has to get a budget and hire consultants that specialise in the ERP they use, who will design a solution, implement it, test it and release it and charge 1500$/day per consultant. Tim Cook's best friend can get it, random Joe can't unless stirs up enough media attention.

My gut feeling is that we should just make such systems legally mandatory. The need for the reversal procedure is a side-effect of Apple's fraud prevention approach and they were the ones to cause the problem. It's only a matter of time until they lose in court and have to reverse such a ban, so why not require the ability to reverse bad decisions in the first place.

Facebook pretended that deleting user data was impossible for a long time. But since GDPR made it mandatory they discovered a cheap way to do it. Some laws work like magic ;)

> Imagine if you walk into an Apple Store, accidentally drop one of their $1000 laptops on the floor so it breaks, and then pretend that it's Apple's fault and refuse to pay for the damage. They'll sue the sh-t out of you

Hahahaha. This is a joke, right?

I don't know. Apple seems fine revoking access to $1000 in DRM content and then refusing to clean up their mess. What's the legal difference between $1000 lost by laptop and $1000 lost by DRM?

Apple is not going to sue you because you accidentally broke a $1000 laptop. (Or a $10000 laptop, still not worth it)

They will just write it off, maybe make an insurance claim.

They probably wouldn't even sue you if you went into the store and started deliberately smashing stuff. (Then you'd face criminal charges, of course)

This got me wondering. Let just say hypothetically speaking, he did commit one fraud with Apple Credit.

Should he have loss access to all iTunes Music, or Movies he bought in the past 10 years?

Would all the Apps he bought still works? Or simply not getting any update?

Even if only one $100 out of $1000 gift cards were detected as fraud, does it make sense to take away the other $900? I am wondering what happens in real world banks, if my account has $1 dollar of dirty money, do they disable it all?

What happens to the other $900 dollar dispute? Apple just confiscate it?

What about not knowing it was fraud in the case aboveand he was actually a victim?

Edit:

What happens to iCloud Photos and Backup?

Assuming you still have your Data on your phone. What about iCloud Photos, if you used "Photo Compression" options all the photos on your Phone are lower quality version with original sitting in iCloud?

What about Sign In with Apple? Assuming all of your Login were done via Apple ID. You now loss access to all the other services?

And I really love Apple Apologist answer to the question

>Your Apple ID account has been reviewed by Fraud Specialists who never disable accounts in error.

This flaw is what keeps me away from digital purchases. If I can loose all the money I put into your service "for any reason", I'd rather not put money into it at all. Even more so if the decision to cease my money is automated.

I believe the only store that does digital purchases right at the moment seems to be Steam, but I'm hesitant to use even that.

Consumer protection laws really need to catch up.

Steam is still DRM. If you lose access to your Steam account you lose access to all the games associated with it.

For downloads yes, if you account is banned that’s it. Still not perfect. But the games don’t necessarily have DRM on the the downloaded files. I own quite a few games I can just copy/backup their files to a different computer and they launch fine without steam installed. But I tend to only buy indie games so…

This is my moment to mention GOG and Bandcamp, who sell you games and music DRM free.

Hi, OP here. Just to answer your questions:

iCloud functionality still works fine (contacts, calendar, photos, backups, etc). In addition to using it on all devices, I can log in to icloud.com.

I have access to my already-installed apps on my mac and iPhone. I can't install new apps or update existing apps. When I get my new M1 MacBook Pro I won't be able to install any App Store apps, or copy them from my old Intel MacBook Pro.

I can't listen to music or other content in iTunes that isn't already downloaded (and I kept nothing local, because I'm low on disk space). This one hurts the most: I will never have access to the music I painstakingly added to iTunes Match. The list of music is still in iTunes, but with the ↓ icon indicating it is only available online, and if I try to download, I get the “account blocked” error.

I can log in to apple.com and purchase items from the store using my Apple ID, but I can't apply my Apple balance to orders.

Apple said I have to create an entirely new Apple ID, I can't just replaced the App Store/iTunes part of my otherwise functional Apple ID.

> Apple said I have to create an entirely new Apple ID, I can't just replaced the App Store/iTunes part of my otherwise functional Apple ID.

That's what kills me the modt in that. That they tell you to create a new account while this is a boolean in their system...

This is pure theft. Justice rendered by a company that protects its interests before its own customers. Justice has been rendered, you have no appeal. What terrorises me is that Apple is not the worst in this category

I think the best solution is to take them to a small claims court. They are essentially defrauding you of significant value. Alternatively file a fraud case with the police.

I noticed that last bit. What an absolutely moronic thing to say. Everyone is capable of making mistakes.

> Should he have loss access to all iTunes Music, or Movies he bought in the past 10 years?

In the regular law texts, there's this concept of a proportional response. That's also why we punish punching someone differently from killing someone. But here, all bets are off, because he has entered a private dictatorship with a highly erratic monarch where nobody really knows what laws will be applied or when.

If anything, this might be a good example of why some people consider treating multi-national corporations like independent countries.

If you shop lifted from your local Target, they would not be allowed to empty your cupboards of all items that potentially could have came from them. They would have to prove each one belongs to them and was obtained via theft first. If they want a policy like this I think they should stop having to use words like 'buy' and start using words like 'indefinite revocable lease' to describe the transaction.

> The Apple Engineer I spoke to was confident, “Nobody at Apple can unblock your account.”

What a load of extrement, not to mention an insult to anyone's intelligence.

> live in remote places and complain about internet connectivity

> I purchased 11 Apple gift cards over the past couple months (legitimately, from Apple, Amazon, and Target)

author recently twitted picture of Mexico City, Twitter suggesting Serbian messages as if it thinks author is in Serbia right now.

S/N ratio for fraud is pretty sttrong.

It's fair to be suspicious of strangers on the internet.

My personal life is very transparent online. My girlfriend is from Mexico City, and we spent lots of time there. I live a digital nomad lifestyle, and travel (or used to, before the pandemic) frequently.

I asked Apple if spending lots of time outside the US while having a US Apple account was part of the problem, and they said no. Please don't judge based on location.

All I'm asking for is a way to appeal my case with Apple, because I have sufficient documentation to show my gift card purchases are legitimate.

>and they said no

in case of suspicion of fraud they never tell you the reason. Mobility, VPNs, chargebacks, gift cards, it all adds up and once system flags you you are screwed.

You're probably correct. Others are coming forward claiming to have added dozens of gift cards to their account over Black Friday without issue. It's not because I'm in Mexico, but it may have been a factor in the algo flagging my account for review.

Quinn here (the OP). A happy (and hopefully final) update: Apple unblocked my account.

I received a call from Isabela with Apple’s Corporate Executive Relations, who explained that my account was blocked in error “because of a glitch” affecting more than a few users. She said they're working with engineering to fix the problem.

I suggested that, based on the stories I've heard of others who also had their accounts blocked, the problem appeared to be that the fraud-detection algorithm has been generating false positives. She said, “yes, something like that.”

I would like to suggest that the actual glitch is not the algorithm, but Apple Support’s obstinance and the lack of recourse offered. I should not have had to email Tim or spam my story all over the internet to get this resolved. Apple should have passed my case to an internal investigation team with whom I could have disputed my case.

For those of you who still have your account blocked, I would recommend the following:

  - Call Apple Support at 1-800-275-2273
  - Tell them your account has been blocked in error. Explain how you've been in communication with others who have also been erroneously blocked including those like myself. You can say that we received confirmation from “Isabela at Corporate Executive Relations” that there is an acknowledged glitch that the engineering team is aware of and working to fix.
  - If the support person isn't sympathetic to your case, gracefully get off the phone and call back later and speak to a different person.
  - Post your story on social media, tag Apple.
  - Continue lobbying for an alternative to the App Store and monopolistic walled gardens.

Very simple and worth repeating ad nauseum: Your digital goods are not yours unless they're physically in your own control. I vaguley sympathize with this person's situation, but this is why if you have shitloads of music, movies, ebooks and whatnot, it's a wise idea to do your best to have as many of them as you can as non-cloud, DRM-free copies right inside your own damn hard drive and fuck the rest or any TOS or rules that say otherwise. Only in this way can nobody can take them away unless your machine is literally broken, stolen or hacked and corrupted. People who "own" dozens of movies on Amazon Prime, or hundreds/thousands of songs on iTunes shouldn't be too surprised when one of these indifferent bigcorps suddenly wipes their digital world away from under them, often for some totally arbitrary bullshit reason. It happens often enough to not just be a hypothetical scare story for anyone.

I think you're right. More people should take matters into their own hands by self-hosting and storing their data locally. Decades ago a home server was almost unreachable for a non-technical computer user. These days there are point-and-click, drag-and-drop, plug-and-play, open-app-and-tap solutions to getting a file server set up in your house. You do pay a premium for the user friendliness but they aren't horrendously expensive. For those of us who are comfortable with installing an OS and setting up NFS or SMB you can get away with a used thin client for a fraction of a peanut. And storage is cheap as ever at roughly $40USD per TB for a new drive. Linux is stable and free with a bunch of tools for managing backups and redundancy. There has honestly never been a better time to get off cloud services and go the DIY route.

It's for that reason I buy music from sites that give you a ZIP download of DRM free lossless files. Used to do it with eMusic in the '00s, now do it via Bandcamp.

For non indie artists I'll buy physical vinyl if it's a good enough record. Otherwise just rip the occasional song via NewPipe.

Same goes for books. DRM free Epub or physical copy.

I will say that I don't have this policy for videogames, but frankly it's only because I got tired of paying through the nose for a gaming PC. It's cheaper to just stream them via Stadia, esoecially since I don't go back to them like I would with music or books.

This should simply go to small claims court.

Agreed, they seem not to take you seriously so court seems the next step.

They locked it for wrong reasons, as you can prove you bought the cards in a normal shop with honest money. Even in a criminal case there comes a point that the suspect has the right to prove his innocence.

If for some odd reason they really cannot unlock your account as they claim, they should have no problem giving you back the money you spent on your account.

I wonder if there are any additional back story? Sounds like he bought large number of Apple gift cards during the black friday sale and then added them to the iTunes account in short amount of time. However, there are limits in place so it’s difficult to purchase that many. If any of the gift cards were bought by others on Amazon/Target/Best Buy and re-sold to him, and the original purchaser committed fraud in obtaining the gift cards, then the cards may be black listed. This could explain the banning especially if large number of them were originally obtained fraudulently.

Hi, I'm Quinn, the OP.

I purchased the gift cards directly from Apple, Amazon, Target, and Citi slowly over the course of two months:

  2021-11-29 $25 from apple.com/store purchase (Apple Shopping Event 2021)
  2021-11-28 $25 from apple.com/store purchase (Apple Shopping Event 2021)
  2021-11-28 $100 from amazon.com
  2021-11-26 $100 from amazon.com
  2021-11-21 $100 from target.com
  2021-11-20 $30 from amazon.com
  2021-10-13 $50 from Citi ThankYou Rewards redemption
  2021-10-13 $100 from amazon.com
  2021-10-04 $125 from amazon.com
  2021-10-04 $100 from amazon.com
  2021-10-03 $150 from amazon.com

I buy them when Amazon and Target have discounts such as “Get $15 Amazon credit with the purchase of a $100 Apple Gift Card”, or “Get 15% discount when you apply Membership Rewards Points towards your order”. The gift cards sold from Amazon and Target are authentic, full-price gift cards.

I’m a risk-adverse person with a good income. I don't waste time on deals that are less than 100% certain.

There is some interesting suggestions on the post I made at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253430231?page=1

I'm happy to answer any questions anyone has about my nightmare surreal experience on the phone with Apple today.

> I’m a risk-adverse person with a good income. I don't waste time on deals that are less than 100% certain.

Yet you lost $1.2k doing something most people would never risk.

>Yet you lost $1.2k doing something most people would never risk.

Buying legit Gift Card from big retailer is certainly not a risk I am aware of and lot of people do it simply because of discount. There used to be 20% and in some cases in early days some retailers even do 25% discount during specials.

I’m with OP here - this is a 100% sensible use of retail sales events/specials.

This is completely false. There are many, many people who have over a few thousand of product in their Apple account and use gift cards.

While true, I would have thought that the risk of buying gift cards from reputable retailers would be no risk at all. Do you assume otherwise?

$1.2k is a whole lot of money. Yes, I would assume that adding this amount to your account makes you an outlier in their system. Yes, I would not risk it.

Looking at my other replies this seem to be common practice though. I guess Apple products are very pricey so I shouldn't be this surprised.

Apple's gift cards can be used for Apple hardware as well (it's not just for apps or movies). For context, $1.2K doesn't even cover an iPhone 13 Pro Max after taxes.

Hi Quinn,

Thanks for the additional information. I did the same thing last year when target had similar offers for $600 or $700 of Apple gift cards and fortunately didn’t run into the same problem as you did. I hope everything works out for you with Apple.

Were the amazon purchases all from the same amazon account?

You talked to what seems like level 1 support at Apple, not an "engineer". Why do you believe them when they say "nobody at Apple" can reverse this decision?

Why should you NOT believe Apple's rep when talking about Apple's services?

It's company's job to hire and train employees who will be competent at servicing company's customers. If said company is unable to hire and train competent personnel capable at servicing its customers, consider not blaming it on the untrained and possibly underpaid 1st support line person working for the company because they're not the bad apple in this case.

Because they realistically do not know the resources their higher ups have access to. Apple support training really is not that comprehensive, I wasn't blaming level 1s. They do not know everything about Apple, hence other reps are coming out and claiming that the account can in fact be restored.

> This is a reminder that you do not own the services provided by companies like Apple. We need an alternative to the App Store. Self-hosting and side-loading apps are the only way we can retain control over the tools we depend on.

No, the problem here is that DRM systems require you have an account with an entity that can terminate your account without refunding you for all the purchases that are tied to the account.

This is true for any DRM system. A 3rd party App Store would just mean you have a different company that can close your account and disable products you already paid for.

This is kind of interesting, there isn't anything immediately obvious here as a clear trigger (lots of these complaints when you get into it you can see maybe what triggered).

Are we sure it was the gift cards? Obviously gift cards are often used in various scams etc, but they should have a way to allow folks to prove they purchased them.

My own guess would be maybe gift cards and overseas IP access if there was some of that, the only thing I can think of (that would be a somewhat high flag in the algo's potentially).

A reversed payment in chain somewhere?

Hi, I'm the OP.

I spent five hours on the phone today with an Apple senior associate and an Apple engineer in the media services department. They were explicit that the fraud prevention department had placed notes on my account with instructions that it should not be reactivated due to violations in the T&C, and that the violations were related to the use of Apple gift cards. So, yes, we're pretty sure it was the gift cards, although it's likely there are some details that I'm not aware of.

They probably have algos that surface fraud-like behavior which is then reviewed by a fraud specialist. I'm sure Apple has to battle massive amounts of fraud. It's a hard job, and it's understandable that in some cases there would be an immediate and irrevocable ban. I'm just astonished that it happened to me.

Is it possible that you bought gift cards that were stolen?

Thanks - that's very interesting!

Looks like you bought the cards yourself. That makes it unlikely that there was a chargeback on any card I think right unless you had a payment issue somewhere along the line?

Regardless, given the relatively large activity on the account I'm surprised the human or algo isn't able to figure this out.

Gift card + chargeback + international IP + small / quiet account = reasonable flag.

But you don't have chargeback or payment failure it doesn't sound like and account isn't that small - so super super interesting!

It’s a long rant of an experience sharing.

I was so excited about Apple’s HideMyEmail feature, part of its basic 50GB plan iCloud+. I noticed it also includes Custom Domain.

Then I went around checking information about these products and features.

As usual Apple found it insulting to provide sufficient documentation, so they haven’t.

Naturally I approached customer care which is essentially phone only. At least in India. There used to be a chat option but the last time I tried I couldn’t find it. Besides I always had to go on phone from chat to get anything worthwhile.

Then the Apple support pingpong started. Very polite, very earnest executives. Giving irrelevant, conflicting answers. Always promising to callback with more information, never doing that. Had to explain the question to every new executive. Rinse repeat.

Can I escalate? “I’m afraid there’s no way.”

Can you send me a mail stating what you’ve said on phone? Because you didn’t provide any publicly available documentation so I need this on email. “Sorry, can’t send email”.

Can you connect me to someone who can say this on email? “Sorry there’s no way to do that”.

Can I talk to your supervisor? Senior? “I am a senior advisor”.

Someone above you? “Sorry that’s not possible”

Can I get an email address where I can ask this question and they can answer? “Sorry support portal and phone is the way to connect with Apple Support”

After lots of head-banging and shouting (Yup! They finally managed to get it out of me) they provided me an email where I could request recording of these customer care calls. I was also told I may or may not get those recordings. Anyway I wrote to that mail from my @icloud.com email account. After two weeks I got a response asking for lots of information about me, including some documents and IDs to prove it was me. I gave up.

It was frustrating to say the least.

But after this I got my answer. That Apple is not a company I should trust. Its anti-consumer behaviour is well known and documented (if one wants to look at it as anyone but a fan) and I realised I was doing what moved me out of Google’s ecosystem.

I was locking myself down into Apple’s ecosystem even further down and worst part of it is they have quite inferior online products and services.

I moved all those HideMyEail and Apple Login accounts to throwaway emails on my secondary domain and cancelled iCloud+.

Their Custom Domain feature is anyway useless from any standards, besides HideMyEmail is not available on Custom Domain (why would Apple do something that’s not locking you down!).

This also reinforced my decision to make my next laptop a non-Apple. I can get a laptop at probably the same price that I will have to spend to get 2 years extended warranty for an Apple laptop (and that costly service provided by shitty third party here).

The last thing I wanted to do was keeping all eggs in one basket. Because at this point I don’t even know whether I will be able to access the @icloud.com account if I have no Apple devices with me. I don’t even want to find out.

You can go to iCloud.com in any web browser.

Why do people buy gift cards for themselves?

Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of it being something you “gift”?

I feel like i’m missing some important detail because I don’t understand why anyone would legitimately do that.

Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted, it’s a legit question.

Sometimes there are sales on gift cards.

Or, even without a sale, buy a gift card at e.g. Amazon or Target, and pay for it with your Amazon or Target credit card and you’ll get 5% off.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com