They have receipts, but the challenging thing here is that fraudsters also generate "receipts".
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.