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Comment by jtbayly | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't say this is obvious at all. If Apple thinks gift cards are fraudulent, it shouldn't sell them or accept them as a payment method.

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I have to agree with this. Either they are too risky to accept, or they're too lucrative to ignore. You can't play both sides here, because it's not going to be the 1T company that gets hurt in the end -- it'll be the small guy with no resources.

Edit: Meã culpa! I didn’t read the article properly, what you are talking about and what I was talking about were two different things and I wrote a snide comment about it. Sorry.

This is not a case of a heuristic. This is a case of provably purchased gift cards, and multiple people at Apple refusing to accept those cards as payment, and in fact retaliating by confiscating the cards, along with all software previously purchased by the user.

This is not accepting gift cards.

They're not "provably purchased". All we know is that the person has "receipts" of some sort. Fraudsters generate receipts too.

It's obvious if you do any work in online fraud, is maybe what I should have said instead. I'm not making a normative argument, just a positive one.

There is a huge difference between declining a transaction, and taking someone's money but giving them nothing in return.

I guess you have experience of the former. Apple is engaged in the latter.

Again, this is every fraud flag story ever. For what it's worth, one reason I'm not huffy about this is that I'm pretty sure they're going to get their funds back or their cards activated or whatever thing needs to happen. It's just going to be an annoying process.

They’ve spent many hours on this already and been denied. I don’t know why you think they’ll get their account unblocked, but I disagree.

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.

Yeah, I also think if I try to go to court, all my devices will turn into a pumpkin.

And if there's any chance of someone stealing your bank account, you shouldn't have one.

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?

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