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Comment by lvl155 | Hacker News Reader

I experienced something similar recently. There’s something going on with gift cards at Apple. It’s a bit fishy. As in they don’t want you to use it so they can report higher holiday season sales. Or they’re experiencing a huge uptick in scams involving the cards. I started wondering if the system they use is actually secure from a cryptographical pov.

My lessons were:

1) if you’re going to accrue gift cards for hardware purchases, use a separate Apple ID. Do not use that ID for anything else and especially not as family organizer.

2) save paper trails for all your gift cards. That’s your only way out of this.

3) be prepared to be treated like a scammer by Apple Support. They will even question where you got the devices you traded in at the store. Some support staff will basically say you stole them without any evidence.

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There are apparently large amounts of NEW gift card scams going around; Target has recently changed how they work and I've heard other reports.

Frankly, staying away from gift cards seems the best option unless it's blast radius can be limited (e.g., redeemed in person).

But that basically screws over loyal Apple customers who trade in an entire family’s worth of iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, Macbooks, etc over the years. Sometimes you just take a giftcard because you don’t want to buy a new thing. Fast forward a couple of years, you basically learn that you traded in your Macbook Pro for nothing. How’s that not a controversy? Perhaps they should give customers non-transferable store credits that cannot be purchased elsewhere. Avoids the entire issue with gift cards.

Perhaps they should just give them cash. But that wouldn't guarantee future sales and they wouldn't make a few extra percent margin off of people who never redeem their cards.

We're a multi-trillion dollar company and your BATNA is terrible. Don't like how we roll? Go fuck yourself.

Gift cards sold or issued at an Apple store are the safest kind.

There is no opportunity for the kinds of large-scale fraud you see with cards purchased elsewhere. The only risks would be the same for any other bearer instrument, e.g. wallet theft.

That’s what I thought too but it’s not. Apple is refusing all gift card related hardware purchases in certain markets. Even what you already redeemed to your account. It certainly piqued my interest in what’s happening behind the scene.

This doesn't sound right to me. Apple is still issuing gift cards for hardware trade-ins as of last week, and obviously they are bound to honor them.

Specific accounts may be flagged, for sure. But a general ban on GC-related purchases would be a very big regulatory deal. Do you have links to a published source?

Ashley Home Furniture is an expert at this.

Throw in gift cards all over the place to incentivize purchases.

Go to use a gift card, "Sorry, gift cards can only be used to pay for full price items, not discounted or sale items".

Conveniently, effectively everything in the store is discounted or on sale.

That would be bad enough as-is. But you move houses, or are moving out for the first time, and someone buys you a gift card, with CASH?

They're the same gift cards. And the same "rules" which are nowhere to be found, just you arguing until you're blue in the face with a store manager who "understands, but policy".

"I could have bought this item with the cash it took to buy the gift card, but because that cash 'changed form', it's now unacceptable for payment?"

Diabolical.

It's extremely common in some areas (any "baby thing" may come with "$50 gift cards" that are not really anything worthwhile).

A law that states you can't call it a "gift card" unless it can be exchanged for cash at 95 cents on the dollar would fix it pretty well.

Addendum to 2: have a blog with thousands of readers which you can use to publicize your case, otherwise Apple won’t give a damn, like they did to Buttfield-Addison. He had the receipts, Apple didn’t care.

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