Apple account disabled after using many different gift cards
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(Edit: The HN headline has now changed.)
As he himself admits, he used a lot of different cards of different values. He doesn't say exactly how many, and I bet that's because it's a lot. He also says he has "multiple Apple ID accounts in different countries".
Apple should absolutely restore this guys account if he isn't actually attempting fraud, but as far as anti-fraud measures go, this would make me suspicious, too.
He should take this to small claims court, I think.
"You're not allowed to have any fraud detection" would be a silly rule. I think there should be an appeals court sort of thing for these scenarios; I suppose that's probably small claims here.
And what everybody here is saying is that gift cards are basically high-fraud, and it's unsurprising that using gift cards could get you banned. So what's the takeaway? As one user said, don't use gift cards at all. If that's what people are recommending, I don't see how the title could be considered click bait.
By that logic, anything happens only because of one tiny thing, and context doesn't matter ever?
And if he wasn't buying the gift cards himself, there's a substantial chance that some of the cards he used were obtained fraudulently (e.g. bought by victims of gift card scams and subsequently sold by the scammers). While there certainly are some legitimate sales of gift cards, there's also a ton of money laundering that takes place, especially when the cards are being sold under face value.
You may have multiplied account - It doesn't go against Apple's rules. Because not all applications are available in all regions and if you come to Europe, you will find many local applications especially for transport (parking) and banks.
I'm sorry this happened to you, but how did you not think activating 2 dozen gift cards would trigger a fraud alarm?
I believe that you are not a scammer, but since Apple doesn't know you bought all of these cards yourself, you exactly fit the profile of someone who scams people and has them send him Apple gift cards over a long period of time, and then he redeems them all at once, thousands worth. Your behavior should have tripped automated systems, and any humans looking at it should have been very suspicious as well.
Like I said, I believe you're not a scammer, although Apple's folks have more experience in dealing with scammers than I do, and they clearly think you are. My belief is based mostly on the fact that you say you have receipts.
The real shame here is that Apple provides no clear appeals process for you to show your receipts and prove you bought these cards yourself.
So Apple's own "rules" don't really have anything to do with the story here; or at least, if they do, that story is shared in common with every major retail business in the world.
It always feels like there is something missing in these stories. Are mistakes made by Apple (or other big cos?) sure. But they don't want to shut people off. Something was done either accidentally or on purpose that likely triggered some internal fraud warning.
I think the biggest problem is getting caught in the low level call center support when the problem needs to be up-leveled to someone who can help. This is something companies should improve on, but I'm sure the volume makes it challenging.
There should be. Let Apple do their fraud detection, and 90%+ of the fraudulent accounts will do nothing further, but for the ones accidentally caught there should be some method, something that is too detailed for scammers to do but possible for a "real person" to do.
It's unlikely to do much, but it may get in front of the right person or may light a fire under someone's ass.
Case in point: just try to visit the US with an EU-based iPhone. Apps like Starbucks, Target, Ralphs, Vons, and many many others will be inaccessible to you.
You'd think we'd be past those ancient divisions in this day and age.
Just had the same experience in Australia; the local grocery store there had an app to figure out which aisle things were in, but I wasn't allowed to download it from the US store.
https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...
> if a transfer of personal data is envisaged to a third country that isn’t the subject of an Adequacy Decision and if appropriate safeguards are absent, a transfer can be made based on a number of derogations for specific situations for example, where an individual has explicitly consented to the proposed transfer after having been provided with all necessary information about the risks associated with the transfer.
What are the implications of losing your Apple account?
- loss of apps, licensed content - inability to perform software upgrades, essentially turning your computers and devices into paperweights - loss of sync for things like contacts, keychain
In the case of Google, I'd lose my Voice account that is the one registered with banks, credit cards and the like (I try to minimize my exposure to Google and tried to use Twilio instead, even paying for it it is very unreliable).
...which is why if you don't want to see this sort of thing we have to get away from tech giants, and diversify.
One suggestion. Do you have any proof that you bought the gift cards legitimately: say receipts from the store or webapp you bought them from or credit card statements you used to purchase the gift cards with? It might bolster your case to provide this kind of information to Apple and show that there was no ill intent. Or at least, it makes sense to gather this info for some kind of suit against them in small claims court for the lost software (try and tally up those prices of all missing software and sue them for that).
The people saying that the person is at fault for using gift cards of varying amounts are not being helpful. If there's no published limitations on their usage, then you should not have to blindly guess how much you can spend before an action is a violation.
If Apple is claiming fraud, I'd think the burden of proof should be on them in small claims court to prove, or at least provide reasonable suspicion, that fraud occurred. If Apple's sole proof is "it's unusual to buy with giftcards" I don't see how they should win a case. You would tell the judge "Hey, if I was some kind of gift card scammer, would I risk showing up in court complaining about the software that was stolen from me?"
I've never taken a big corporation to small claims court, but I'd think a judge would be sympathetic about this kind of situation. It would look bad on Apple if the person supplied proof he bought the gift cards in good faith, had a reasonable explanation for why he used them, pointed out there were no published limits for their usage, and then pointed out that Apple effectively robbed him of $XXXX dollars worth of software he paid for without any reasonable recourse.
The issue here doesn't seem to be that they took action, but that they won't restore the account. I think it's reasonable to expect that, upon producing evidence, the burden is back on the retailer.
If gift cards are suspicious and cannot be reliably secured, then why are they even sold?
1. The large set of gift card transactions that involve just one or two gift cards being used in a long period of time by a single person, which don't set off fraud flags.
2. The other large set of bulk gift card uses, which are overwhelmingly fraudulent.
So the answer would then be: they're sold for case (1), and policed for case (2). Don't do case (2).
25-40 gift cards, purchased in several different countries over an extended period of time, that is what's suspicious.
In the first two cases, the most likely explanation is that the cards are gifts. I mean, it could be that I bought them myself, which would also be fine, but most likely I've just had a birthday or someone said thank you in a monetary way.
In the third case, the most likely explanation is that I'm a scammer, and have exploited ignorant people, convincing them to buy me gift cards, and I'm finally cashing them all in.
It isn't gift cards that are intrinsically suspicious. It's the pattern of behavior. If OP is indeed as innocent as they claims to be--and I see no reason to believe otherwise--then they are very much an edge case, with a very unusual pattern of behavior. That is the issue, not the cards themselves.
And if 25 gift cards is the limit, then why can't this information be published so people understand what the rules are?
A system can't work if people don't know what the rules are.
It would be easy to demonstrate how publishing a rule that says "23 gift cards within 36 hours triggers our systems" would obviously and necessarily lead to scammers redeeming 22 gift cards every 36 hours, right? So in fact, there's some kind trigger, and it might change based on time of day, it might change per origin country, it might change based on account age, who knows? Anti-scam and anti-spam measures succeed primarily by being flexible and vague. In this case, and in many cases, humans who looked at the full pattern of behavior (a full pattern we have only the OP's description of part of) also decided that this was likely fraudulent. That human factor is always going to be important, because some people just do unpredictably weird things sometimes.
This is not about Apple and gift cards, this is ANY system that doesn't plan to turn into a scam-filled wasteland.
A system can't work if everybody knows exactly how to avoid triggering automatic fraud detection.
What happens to the handful of individuals who are not committing fraud, but were just doing uncommon things and accidentally tripped some unpublished anti-fraud measure?
You agree that this isn't ok to just let them hang, right? What's the strategy for helping those people? Certainly, you're not suggesting that it's just ok to essentially say "Fuck you" to the random person who was algorithmically unlucky and essentially have a mega-corporation take a few thousand dollars of their paid for software?
I would say that if you're an entity that employs these kinds of vague, unpublished rules, that there must be a fast, real, and human recourse for talking to somebody to get the problem seriously addressed or you're behaving no better than a criminal entity.
However, OP has talked to humans, and apparently those humans--with access to more info than we have here--believe OP to be a scammer. (Or don't care enough to act.) Since I don't have access to that information, I feel bad for OP, and hope there's a higher level of humans he can talk to, but insinuating that Apple is a criminal entity seems a bit much.
Not every human has equal knowledge, training, and authority to resolve problems. Since I have no clue of the inner-workings of Apple's support centers, I can only give reasonable speculation. How do call centers in big corporations generally work?
The employees (or contractors) are low-ranking members and without much leeway or authority to do anything other than what they're trained to do. They're usually professional enough and probably want to help people, but they're typically only trained and authorized to assist with common tasks they basically have a "script" for: maybe telling you when your order is going to ship or helping you reserve an appointment for a repair, common things like that. If your customer service request fits within the box of common tasks that they're trained and authorized to help with, you're likely good. But if your request is uncommon and they haven't been trained to help you with that, then even this human contact is useless. Maybe they're specifically trained that when they see the word "fraud" on an account profile, that they can't do anything else, and don't even know that a false positive can exist.
It's very easy to see how even with human contact, a circumstance might have been engineered where an unlucky person can slip through the cracks.
> but insinuating that Apple is a criminal entity seems a bit much.
If it's the case that a corporation uses an algorithms that they know could lead to false positives that steals peoples' money, and doesn't provide genuine human support (meaning actual managers and supervisors with authority and training to really investigate a case, not a low-ranking call-center employee with no training or ability to help) then yeah I'd say that they're behaving like a criminal entity.
The caveat here is that I don't know the real details of this case, and I don't know how Apple's customer service staff are trained and operate.
I just imagined for a minute - what if someone asks for a birthday present with cards and his friends bring him a pack. It's a GIFT and it's named GIFT card
That "GIFT" card, is a printed PAN, plus metadata that acts as close as you can get to a bearer account in the modern financial system. It's an endpoint that is incredibly difficult to really secure. KYC makes it a fraught thing to deal with, and organized crime knows and actively uses these mechanisms on a regular basis.
Your activity pattern, like it or not, is mirrored by drug dealers, arms dealers, scammers, and other criminal enterprises looking to clean up ill gotten funds. We can't have nice things, because as soon as we do, some jerkwad starts running his profits from human or narco tracking through it.
Further, there is something known as "structuring" which by itself, is a federal crime, and no, the feds are not too picky about who they deem to be actively structuring. Stucturing is moving money around in such a way as to avoid triggering reporting requirements.
$2000 worth of gift cards is a dead giveaway. That's right on what eould normaly be reported as a CSR or SAR if done all at once if I recall. If you actively inquire about said reporting limits, that generally has to be reported or noted somewhere too.
There is a right way to do things in the financial system, and there is the wrong way. You definitely hit on the wrong way. Is it annoying? Yes. So sorry.
However... It is what it is. If you want to know another thing that is the same way, look at Terms of Use/Licensing agreements/EULAs... etc... If you want to redline something and negotiate something else than the canned stuff legal blessed, sorry bout it, but it is cheaper to forego your business rather than accommodate you. We cannot have nice things, because every time we try to make nice things, jerks ruin it for everyone else.
Also, an additional bit: most companies do gift cards in order to either manage float (money held for a time to accrue interest before being spent), or to harvest consumer purchasing data to monetize. Often, they are trying to localize on one particular person, per account, and want to do so cheaply, and easily.
You getting say 50 different cards makes 49 other people's data they are missing out on. No one wants that. It's a degenerate state for the business/surveillance capitalism model. Therefore, you're going to find organizational policies will make it hard for you to do that.
Nor, mind, are they likely to try to help you remediate your errant behavior. That's a lot of clean up and paperwork, particularly for such a small amount (in their view), and also because, formalizing such a process encourages the use of it, which is non-value generating for the company/host-state.
Again, and with 100% sincerity, I regret to inform you, you are currently residing in the worst timeline, second only to the ones in which you are dead, in imminent risk of dying, or on fire.
If you were physically closer, I'd offer you one of those little hats you can fold out of a periodical or aluminum foil, or a paper bag to wear over your head... It wouldn't help in terms of changing the world to make your problem no longer a problem, but you'd at least be a rung up into the "free hat and not on fire" timeline.
Welcome to the "life in the edge cases" club.
You're coming off like a "technically correct" guy that completely missed the user experience.
When scammers trick people into buying gift cards for them, and the scammers later redeem them, say 25-35 of them bought by victims over time for a total of $2k, it is dastardly and horrible of Apple to not work harder to stop the scammers.
I happen to believe the OP here, but it's really easy to see how this happened, and why Apple's people could feel like they're doing a Good Thing™ here.
But more to the point, it could easily be that it takes 15 or 20 cards within a short amount of time before the automated systems are triggered. Apple has a lot of data on how scammers operate, and has dealt with scammers many, many, many times, and probably continues to refine their checks periodically. Still assuming you are not a scammer, you are definitely unlucky.
There are few things fraud-ier than gift cards. It sucks! There's nothing morally wrong with using them! But anything outside the absolute most normal usage of a gift card is likely to stick you in a user cluster that is overwhelmingly fraudulent.
This is not accepting gift cards.
I guess you have experience of the former. Apple is engaged in the latter.
I expect the best that can happen is a small claims court victory thereby getting their money back, but not their software. And that might also be followed by a lifetime ban by Apple.
And you should only use your credit card at places where there's zero chance of it getting stolen (no US restaurants!), or getting skimmed, or hacked once it's in their system.
...Or perhaps we live in a world where things are not entirely black and white, and nuance exists?
And this is the problem of the user rather than the business? I find any attempt to justify behavior like this disgusting. Just say it the way it is - Apple maximizes its profits by imposing costs like this on others. From that perspective, you cannot justify restrictions on a restaurant running sewage into the street, since the profit of the business trumps all else.
If you've worked in anti-fraud stuff before, you know: there isn't a single clear answer to fraud. There's no reliable way to stop it. It's all just a big series of heuristics. And it's a cat-and-mouse game, because if you're Apple, your fraudster adversaries sink enormous amounts of time into working out the minutia of your customer support and anti-fraud processes looking for gaps.
Which means there's probably no way in hell you're going to be able to talk your way out of a fraud hit with a customer support agent. They're simply not qualified to do that.
If your algorithm throws all these people in with fraudsters, then it's a bad algorithm.
(This problem would be fixed if Apple offered other payment options aside from credit cards)
"Cashed in a bunch of different gift cards in varying denominations to buy an M1 Macbook" is a transaction that is probably 50:1 fraud:real, which is the sucky part of this situation.
If someone had posted on HN and asked "would it be a good idea to cash in a bunch of gift cards to buy a Macbook on the Apple store", you'd have a thread where almost every comment started with "NO!!!", caps and exclamations included.
Apple is a horrible company. Richer than god and they can't afford to provide support to paying customers, even if they're brand loyal. I would choose a master who doesn't care 10 times out of 10 to living in a walled garden where you get smacked for reasons you couldn't have possibly anticipated.
The reality is that a citizen's world runs on these services. You need email, a phone and phone number, etc. to get by in this world. Either apple should be ripped up to shreds with antitrust because they've monopolized people's lives, or they're required to provide these services for a specified time and with a set of assurances.
And it really disappointed me to have spent the last few years advising all my friends and colleagues to switch to a Macbook for work
As far as I know all money flows above non-trivial amounts have to be attached to some entity. Gift cards allow to bypass that, since, well - they can be bought in store for hard cash.
2000$ is non trivial amount (and honestly, I'm really wondering why one would have that much, that's for digital content only, right?) - if that's OPs primary way of adding money to the account it stinks of a laundry scheme. Buy gift cards at kiosks, buy obscure DLCs, cash out.
Probably the way out would be to provide full paper trail. Not sure if Apple even can ask for it, though. As someone else wrote in comment, getting on the bad side of the fraud detection tough nut to crack.
If that’s the case, you need to stop looking like a scammer. One potential way to do that is to use the U.S. court system. On the whole, criminals try to avoid that institution and its insistence on verifying identities and facts.
Someone said take Apple to small claims court, which might be one way to start. I would consider at least meeting with a lawyer. A well-written letter from an actual attorney, sent to Apple’s legal department, might help change the conversation. The initial meeting should be free and the letter might not cost much as a first step.
I can no longer fully use my account - download apps I bought, update them, use my balance, renew subscriptions. And all of this affects all my Apple devices - two iPhones, two iPads, a Macbook Pro and an Apple Watch.
As I was told by one of the 30 operators I managed to talk to on the phone after spending about 12 hours of my time on it, the reason was that "you redeemed several gift cards too quickly and they all had different face value".
I've been an Apple products user for a bit over 10 years now and have used a variety of devices and gadgets. And in the last 3 years my whole team of 20 people almost completely switched to Apple devices and ecosystem. And up until that point I thought it was a mutually beneficial and friendly relationship.
I've been travelling a lot in the last 10 years and living and working in different countries. For this reason, I have multiple Apple ID accounts in different countries. Since not all the apps, especially banking, food delivery and cab apps, are available in all Apple Stores (according to Apple you can have up to 5 accounts). And I usually use gift certificates, because it helps me not to think about which card is used and when it expires. And it seems that I've been using them since my first introduction to Apple products 10 years ago.
In early July 2022, right on my birthday, my Macbook pro 15 2019 was suddenly showing no signs of life. While it was being repaired, I decided to consider upgrading my working computer. After choosing the needed configuration, I redeemed my supply of gift cards to my account. I still have receipts for almost all of the cards, as well as the cards themselves.
A few days later, I was about to place an order for a new working laptop, when I found out that I was getting an error "Your account has been disabled in the App Store and iTunes" when trying to purchase something. After that, long calls and conversations with technical support began, and it did not lead to any solution. As a result, I was left without a new laptop, and most importantly - all the digital content that I bought on my iPhone, iPad, Macbook Pro - I can no longer use and update it. And that are dozens of subscriptions, Final Cut licences, Logic Pro, and a lot of other software. Tech support gave me only one solution - create a new account and buy everything again. And this is not one hundred, and not even one thousand dollars.
As I see it, the tech support is unwilling to solve my problem or help solving it in any way. Phrases like "yes I understand you" will in no way compensate for my lost time I spent over the phone with them nor earn the money that I spent buying apps that Apple has taken away on its own whim due to some very questionable reasons.
But redeeming a bunch of random gift cards (most especially if they were purchased in a bunch of different countries) is extremely fraud-like behavior. There's nothing wrong with what you did! You're not a fraudster! But you undertook a series of actions that is almost exclusively undertaken by fraudsters.
The recovery process for this situation is especially annoying, because fraudsters absolutely will try to talk their way out of fraud controls, and first- and second- line customer support people aren't qualified to go toe-to-toe with fraudsters (who are hyperspecialized and thus simply better at winning these CS interactions than the customer support staff is). So, yeah, your recovery experience is going to be hostile and prolonged.
My guess is what you need to do here is find a way to escalate out of customer service. Maybe someone else on HN has advice on how to do that.
I don't know where you call home but in the US we have small claims court. Maximum penalties are in the region of $5000 but the nice thing is you can file yourself without a lawyer. This might kick it up the ladder to someone that could get this fixed. OR it could go really badly and have them double down on locking you out.
Hopefully you get the exposure here/twitter to get the right person involved in getting this solved.
Thank you all for your comments and answers! This is very inspiring!
It is a disgrace. Fraud or not. Only a court should decide this.
I got a call today from Apple Retail Executive Relations department. They made manual review of my account and restore it. Problem solved.
Thanks everybody for your advice and support. I'm sure our discussion helped to get the problem noticed.