>where Apple bans accounts for redeeming legitimate gift cards.
Is there any evidence of this happening with an actual legitimate gift card and bot one which was stolen or originally purchased via credit card fund.
Is there any evidence of this happening with an actual legitimate gift card and bot one which was stolen or originally purchased via credit card fund.
When Cyberpunk 2077 came out, my wife bought it with her credit card and gifted the game to me. It was fine at first. I even managed to play through the game. However when coming back to the game a few months later (to see all the bugfixes), it was gone. I contacted the (gog) and they said it was removed due to automatic fraud detection and that the balance had been paid back to the original credit card (my wife's card, she had obviously not noticed this in her bank statement).
Point being automatic fraud detection systems can wipe out stuff you purchased even months after the fact (or in some cases lock your account)... It feels kafkaesque.
Incorrect, the milk does not disappear. You are contractually and legally obligated not to drink the milk, much in the same way I should not go around killing people, but I certainly have the ability to.
Now, if you sell the customer electrically locking milk bottles which won't open after the contract is over, then the customer "can't" drink the milk, they couldn't.
I don't dispute that GOG has the right, from a strictly legal standpoint, to revoke a license for any reason their terms of service allow, and that someone continuing to play a game after their license was revoked would be in breach of contract. What I do dispute is that this is a correct, fair, or desirable state of affairs, especially when the license in question was received as a gift and believed in good faith by the recipient to have been acquired non-fraudulently.
And in particular, if GOG wants the absolute and irrevocable right to prevent consumers from using products for which GOG has decided to revoke the licenses, they shouldn't advertise themselves as a DRM-free platform, nor claim that "Here, you won't be locked out of titles you paid for, or constantly asked to prove you own them - this is DRM-free gaming." -- advertising copy may not have the force of law, but courts tend to take a dim view of ad claims that are provably false.
[0]: the list price of the Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition on GOG as of this writing (though it is currently on sale for 38% off)
If you buy milk from the supermarket and they reverse the transaction 2 days later claiming you used a fraudulent card, but you didn't use a fraudulent card, you have the right to keep the milk and the loss of money is the store's problem.
> The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale)
This is the important quote showing that the gift card was not legitimate.
apple recommended they only buy gift cards from apple, but they still sell them in stores...
obviously money is more important to them than the consumers but pretending apple have zero responsibility is silly
It was locked for less than a week.
>but they still sell them in stores
Unfortunately there are sketchy resellers that exist too.
For Apple to say "Don't buy gift cards from our authorized retailers, or prepare to face incredibly harsh consequences due to fraud that you can't detect or predict" while continuing to sell them through those channels is morally bankrupt and completely unacceptable.
I have no doubt fraud is a big problem. It is for all gift cards. But this is a 3 trillion dollar company -- and they make minimum 30% of every gift card sold in pure profit. If they can't secure those channels without torpedoing innocent customers' entire digital lives, they need to drop that channel.
If somebody bought something from Walmart you wouldn’t insinuate he’s at fault because he bought it from a ‘sketchy retailer’. Just stop it lol. There is literally no way to defend Apple on that one.
If unknowingly using a stolen gift card just meant you lost your money, nobody would be complaining about Apple's behavior here. The issue is that they didn't just lose their money, they also got their account locked, which locks up a lot of stuff completely unrelated to gift cards.
Our victim was the victim of the only theft that involved the gift card. Then Apple stole the person's whole digital life with no recourse because they are ham-fisted and don't care.
i would be surprised if there's any company with millions of users where .01 or .001 (still a LOT of users) just get screwed with zero recourse