Apple user permabanned, loses $1.2K in App Store goods for legit gift card buys (opens in new tab)

This got me wondering. Let just say hypothetically speaking, he did commit one fraud with Apple Credit.

Should he have loss access to all iTunes Music, or Movies he bought in the past 10 years?

Would all the Apps he bought still works? Or simply not getting any update?

Even if only one $100 out of $1000 gift cards were detected as fraud, does it make sense to take away the other $900? I am wondering what happens in real world banks, if my account has $1 dollar of dirty money, do they disable it all?

What happens to the other $900 dollar dispute? Apple just confiscate it?

What about not knowing it was fraud in the case aboveand he was actually a victim?

Edit:

What happens to iCloud Photos and Backup?

Assuming you still have your Data on your phone. What about iCloud Photos, if you used "Photo Compression" options all the photos on your Phone are lower quality version with original sitting in iCloud?

What about Sign In with Apple? Assuming all of your Login were done via Apple ID. You now loss access to all the other services?

And I really love Apple Apologist answer to the question

>Your Apple ID account has been reviewed by Fraud Specialists who never disable accounts in error.

I wonder if there are any additional back story? Sounds like he bought large number of Apple gift cards during the black friday sale and then added them to the iTunes account in short amount of time. However, there are limits in place so it’s difficult to purchase that many. If any of the gift cards were bought by others on Amazon/Target/Best Buy and re-sold to him, and the original purchaser committed fraud in obtaining the gift cards, then the cards may be black listed. This could explain the banning especially if large number of them were originally obtained fraudulently.

"Nobody at Apple can unblock your account"

=> You're a-holes.

I can understand that Apple has to deal with a lot of fraud and so they need to proactively flag and ban accounts. But all these accounts are still mutable electronic records. If he moves, changes his email, or changes his name (e.g. marriage) they can update the account to the new reality just fine. So there's nothing preventing Apple from renaming his old account to get it out of the way, then creating a new account with the same data, then re-associating his previous app and music purchases to that new account. Will that involve costly manual work? Probably. But is it possible? Definitely.

What they effectively did here is they screwed up (that part is OK) and now they are trying to weasel out of the consequences (that part is bad) while simultaneously insulting their customer's intelligence by pretending that "expensive to them" equals "impossible" (that part is evil).

Imagine if you walk into an Apple Store, accidentally drop one of their $1000 laptops on the floor so it breaks, and then pretend that it's Apple's fault and refuse to pay for the damage. They'll sue the sh-t out of you. This is kinda the same situation in reverse. They are probably hoping that he won't lawyer up because he's a fanboy. But he should. Corporations need legally binding feedback or else his once favorite company will gradually rot from its core until he can eventually not enjoy using them anymore.

> live in remote places and complain about internet connectivity

> I purchased 11 Apple gift cards over the past couple months (legitimately, from Apple, Amazon, and Target)

author recently twitted picture of Mexico City, Twitter suggesting Serbian messages as if it thinks author is in Serbia right now.

S/N ratio for fraud is pretty sttrong.

This is kind of interesting, there isn't anything immediately obvious here as a clear trigger (lots of these complaints when you get into it you can see maybe what triggered).

Are we sure it was the gift cards? Obviously gift cards are often used in various scams etc, but they should have a way to allow folks to prove they purchased them.

My own guess would be maybe gift cards and overseas IP access if there was some of that, the only thing I can think of (that would be a somewhat high flag in the algo's potentially).

A reversed payment in chain somewhere?

Very simple and worth repeating ad nauseum: Your digital goods are not yours unless they're physically in your own control. I vaguley sympathize with this person's situation, but this is why if you have shitloads of music, movies, ebooks and whatnot, it's a wise idea to do your best to have as many of them as you can as non-cloud, DRM-free copies right inside your own damn hard drive and fuck the rest or any TOS or rules that say otherwise. Only in this way can nobody can take them away unless your machine is literally broken, stolen or hacked and corrupted. People who "own" dozens of movies on Amazon Prime, or hundreds/thousands of songs on iTunes shouldn't be too surprised when one of these indifferent bigcorps suddenly wipes their digital world away from under them, often for some totally arbitrary bullshit reason. It happens often enough to not just be a hypothetical scare story for anyone.

Quinn here (the OP). A happy (and hopefully final) update: Apple unblocked my account.

I received a call from Isabela with Apple’s Corporate Executive Relations, who explained that my account was blocked in error “because of a glitch” affecting more than a few users. She said they're working with engineering to fix the problem.

I suggested that, based on the stories I've heard of others who also had their accounts blocked, the problem appeared to be that the fraud-detection algorithm has been generating false positives. She said, “yes, something like that.”

I would like to suggest that the actual glitch is not the algorithm, but Apple Support’s obstinance and the lack of recourse offered. I should not have had to email Tim or spam my story all over the internet to get this resolved. Apple should have passed my case to an internal investigation team with whom I could have disputed my case.

This should simply go to small claims court.

> This is a reminder that you do not own the services provided by companies like Apple. We need an alternative to the App Store. Self-hosting and side-loading apps are the only way we can retain control over the tools we depend on.

It’s a long rant of an experience sharing.

I was so excited about Apple’s HideMyEmail feature, part of its basic 50GB plan iCloud+. I noticed it also includes Custom Domain.

Then I went around checking information about these products and features.

As usual Apple found it insulting to provide sufficient documentation, so they haven’t.

Naturally I approached customer care which is essentially phone only. At least in India. There used to be a chat option but the last time I tried I couldn’t find it. Besides I always had to go on phone from chat to get anything worthwhile.

Then the Apple support pingpong started. Very polite, very earnest executives. Giving irrelevant, conflicting answers. Always promising to callback with more information, never doing that. Had to explain the question to every new executive. Rinse repeat.

Can I escalate? “I’m afraid there’s no way.”

Can you send me a mail stating what you’ve said on phone? Because you didn’t provide any publicly available documentation so I need this on email. “Sorry, can’t send email”.

Can you connect me to someone who can say this on email? “Sorry there’s no way to do that”.

Can I talk to your supervisor? Senior? “I am a senior advisor”.

Someone above you? “Sorry that’s not possible”

Can I get an email address where I can ask this question and they can answer? “Sorry support portal and phone is the way to connect with Apple Support”

After lots of head-banging and shouting (Yup! They finally managed to get it out of me) they provided me an email where I could request recording of these customer care calls. I was also told I may or may not get those recordings. Anyway I wrote to that mail from my @icloud.com email account. After two weeks I got a response asking for lots of information about me, including some documents and IDs to prove it was me. I gave up.

It was frustrating to say the least.

But after this I got my answer. That Apple is not a company I should trust. Its anti-consumer behaviour is well known and documented (if one wants to look at it as anyone but a fan) and I realised I was doing what moved me out of Google’s ecosystem.

I was locking myself down into Apple’s ecosystem even further down and worst part of it is they have quite inferior online products and services.

I moved all those HideMyEail and Apple Login accounts to throwaway emails on my secondary domain and cancelled iCloud+.

Their Custom Domain feature is anyway useless from any standards, besides HideMyEmail is not available on Custom Domain (why would Apple do something that’s not locking you down!).

This also reinforced my decision to make my next laptop a non-Apple. I can get a laptop at probably the same price that I will have to spend to get 2 years extended warranty for an Apple laptop (and that costly service provided by shitty third party here).

The last thing I wanted to do was keeping all eggs in one basket. Because at this point I don’t even know whether I will be able to access the @icloud.com account if I have no Apple devices with me. I don’t even want to find out.

Why do people buy gift cards for themselves?

Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of it being something you “gift”?

I feel like i’m missing some important detail because I don’t understand why anyone would legitimately do that.

> The Apple Engineer I spoke to was confident, “Nobody at Apple can unblock your account.”

What a load of extrement, not to mention an insult to anyone's intelligence.