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Comment by panda88888 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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