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Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

• ThaFresh 11mo ago
  do not redeem!
• rtavares 11mo ago
  Related: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help. 1730 points, 1045 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252114
• purpleflame1257 11mo ago
  Every time a read a story like this, I feel an atavistic desire to self-host eveything. But I've had my Google account for 20 years now; the die is cast.
  • bayindirh 11mo ago
    I'm slowly decoupling things and hosting parts of my infrastructure myself. Let it be on a cloud server or a home machine. Doing everything and/or all-at-once is not practical, but having backups for most critical infrastructure helps a lot, and when it's rolling, it rolls without effort. One can go step by step and call it's done when it becomes too much to bear or satisfactorily decoupled.
  • wrxd 11mo ago
    If you never start you'll never be free. It's also not all or nothing. You can keep things with Google, self-host new stuff and gradually move over things that make sense to mover over.
    • moffkalast 11mo ago
      How does one self host an email server these days and not get flagged into oblivion?
      • rationalist 11mo ago
        At least use a service with actual customer support like Fastmail, and backup your email with an email client that downloads copies of your email to your computer.
        • moffkalast 11mo ago
          I mean Proton seems like a good (although extremely expensive) option, but these small companies could go out of business on a dime which is a problem when the effort to switch is a titanic undertaking.
          • rationalist 11mo ago
            If you use your own domain, it's just as simple as switching some MX records (and the TXT or whatever for DMARC etc)
  • paulpauper 11mo ago
    creating backups is crucial. this includes all the contacts, texts of saved emails, photos and so on. Many of these ppl who get locked out fail to create local backups and rely on apple's cloud storage. big mistake.
    • bombcar 11mo ago
      Even just simulating "what if I lost this account" and seeing what you can't access (have your wife change your password and not tell you for a month or so, say) - tells you what you'll be missing. The tendrils can run deep.
  • csomar 11mo ago
    > But I've had my Google account for 20 years now Just realize this: the longer you play this game, the higher your odds of getting banned. Once it hit me, I quickly decoupled from Google. It's like playing satoshi roulette for 0.5% gains. You keep winning until you get fully wiped.
    • zahlman 11mo ago
      What do/did you do about other people having your Gmail address as a primary contact?
      • qingcharles 11mo ago
        I just contacted them all and gave them my new address after I was locked out.
  • QuiEgo 11mo ago
    I have a strong desire not to self host the “live” copy of anything. If my server goes down, I don’t want to have to drop everything and fix it (e.x. if I’m on vacation, I don’t want to have to take a laptop incase I need to fix any server troubles - I go on vacation not to be on call!). That said, keeping a backup of everything, decoupled from any account I don’t control, gives me huge peace of mind.
• IAmBroom 11mo ago
  Related: there is a known scam where someone will ask for payment by things like Ebay gift cards. To "prove you have the card", you are asked to read off just the last few digits of the card - which unbeknownst to the intended victim is actually all that is needed to redeem the card. You can reliably reconstruct a SSN that is missing the first digits, if you know where the person lived when they filed for it, but that's not the same thing. Why Ebay built this idiotic weakness into their cards is beyond me.
  • jkaplowitz 11mo ago
    > You can reliably reconstruct a SSN that is missing the first digits, if you know where the person lived when they filed for it, but that's not the same thing. This used to be true, but isn’t for SSNs assigned since I think 2011 - the exact year could be wrong, that’s from memory. Since that switch, the component that used to be geographical is assigned randomly.
    • IAmBroom 11mo ago
      A wise move, IMO. The geographic thing made sense, pre-internet: our local office assigns only number that start "477-", and no other office does, so we can control for duplicate assignments.
  • zahlman 11mo ago
    > Related: there is a known scam where someone will ask for payment by things like Ebay gift cards. To "prove you have the card", you are asked to read off just the last few digits of the card - which unbeknownst to the intended victim is actually all that is needed to redeem the card. I'm not following. If things have gotten this far, the victim has already been duped into buying the card and intends to send it to the scammers anyway... ? But also, how could the card possibly work that way? What are the other digits even for; and wouldn't they quickly run out of valid "last few digit" combinations for issued cards?
    • IAmBroom 11mo ago
      > I'm not following. If things have gotten this far, the victim has already been duped into buying the card and intends to send it to the scammers anyway... ? Yes, the mark has essentially fallen for the scam, but not yet arrived for the goods... which don't actually exist. > But also, how could the card possibly work that way? What are the other digits even for; and wouldn't they quickly run out of valid "last few digit" combinations for issued cards? Exactly why I hate that Ebay uses their insipid coding schema. I'm not explaining why they do it, because I can't.
• owenthejumper 11mo ago
  It's almost a rhetorical question, isn't it? Clearly, from both the original post, and this reporting, they are NOT safe to redeem. In addition, it just re-emphasizes how tied we all are to these "digital lives". I used to do it without a blink, but now think twice before clicking "Login with Google/Apple".
  • realusername 11mo ago
    Personally I only use these login buttons for throwaway accounts, if it's something important, I'll use email/password.
    • xboxnolifes 11mo ago
      The distinction only matters if your email isn't Gmail, and I'd wager for most people that is their primary email.
  • altairprime 11mo ago
    > Strangely, he did tell me to only ever buy gift cards from Apple themselves The Singapore Apple exec person who eventually reported the issue fixed provided the above advice, and I think it is the best advice given to anyone in this entire situation. What can a normal person do? Only buy Apple gift cards from Apple, only buy Home Depot gift cards from Home Depot, et cetera. That one piece of advice destroys a retail line of revenue that’s suffering massive endpoint fraud and removes the vast majority of risks to recipients of gift cards, and is simply explained to uninterested people that those conveniently-placed gift cards are bait cast by fishers for the unwary. (I’d also sue the retailer in small claims court for selling a fraudulent product that didn’t perform as advertised.)
• PaulHoule 11mo ago
  Gift cards: it's a steal, so just say no. I want to say if you get one from your sister-in-law give it back but now I'm afraid she'll face terrible consequences from cashing it out. ... note an update on this story: Paris got his account unblocked today, thanks to the story being covered here and throughout the blogosphere. It's a good outcome but not a path open to most people: https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/ https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/
• oidar 11mo ago
  I'm glad that got resolved for Paris, but what the hell is a normal person supposed to do. Not every one has that kind of public reach to get a satisfactory resolution. First he had understand what happened technically, then he needed a public platform to tell people about it, then that writing needed to get reposted by others, than PR needed to get involved. Not something that's going to happen for a normal user. Apple, Google, and the big players are not a trustworthy place to entrust precious data. Increasingly, Apple and Google aren't very much different as they are both in the advertisement business: the great misaligner of incentives.
  • sigseg1v 11mo ago
    Agreed. A situation similar to this happened to me with Steam over a payment issue with their service. They banned me even though I had thousands of dollars of games and an account since Sept 2003. I had to go to my bank and escalate multiple times to get letters providing the info steam wanted about my account and credit card to prove it was legitimate. Eventually after contacting them enough times they said they would do a "one time good faith" gesture by unbanning me but warned if it ever happens again they cannot help and that my account will be flagged with this. In the end I didn't do anything wrong and the bank didn't do anything wrong, it was all on steam. It was over $10 by the way.
    • vablings 11mo ago
      Sadly, the real issue here is with the banks and the payment processors. It's very likely that they have metrics for larger marketplaces about being below a threshold for fraud. Online game stores like steam live, breathe and die by payment processing. This was the reason why free trade was removed from RuneScape back in the day and it wasn't even a Jagex issue. People would go to 3rd party gold selling websites and then pay for gold with stolen credit cards. They could easily keep the money because the trade cannot be reversed without a moderator and what they were doing was against the rules so everyone would just get banned. The payment processors saw a bunch of fraud related to a game called RuneScape and told Jagex if they dont fix this then they will be blacklisted.
• freedomben 11mo ago
  Genuine question: if your Apple account is locked, and you're unable to create a new one, is your iPhone still usable?
  • estimator7292 11mo ago
    If you read the other posts about this, the author explains that the phone technically still works, but you can't access iMessage or anything. Probably basic text and calls only.
    • exitb 11mo ago
      The author did mention though that they were unable to log out of iCloud, as that requires to be logged in to iCloud. That would prevent reuse of the device with a different account.
  • tikimcfee 11mo ago
    In a genuine and everyday real sense, no, your likely thousand dollar device is not usable. The App Store requires an account to download from. Internal services and apps often complain about not being available. You are mostly stuck with whatever built in, non-cloud services the device comes with, which isn't much. Weather and mail fetching come to mind. Maybe some of the simple recording / note taking like apps. A working Apple ID is essentially a requirement to actually use the device you purchase. And yes there will be comments from folks about "ways" you can perhaps sideload or get things running, but to a regular person that simply uses a phone like a standard appliance in their life - they're stuck.
  • SirMaster 11mo ago
    Why can't you make a new one?
    • catlikesshrimp 11mo ago
      You forgot to add /s and the reference, because you come up as conceited, when you are being critic of previous Apple statements.
• srmatto 11mo ago
  This fiasco stirs up a lot of different topics for me, none of which seem like they are likely to be resolved anytime soon. First, with so much importance placed on an Apple/iCloud account in our current era it's not good that they can be shutdown so trivially. Someone can be shut out from using Messages, Apple Wallet, Digital Identification (depending on where they live) and all their subscriptions and media purchases without any recourse, in an instant. It's not hard to imagine someone being put into a pretty bad situation as a result of this with just a little bad luck and bad timing. It's easy to point out that you shouldn't be overly reliant on these technologies but I think it's more important that there be ways to safe guard people from this scenario. Apple should do more to handle these scenarios given the importance of an account now. Second, there are other recent events that point out the failure modes and gaps that Apple (and Google?) need to address. There apparently is no way to cleanly divide purchases in a Divorce or separation, even if the person was fleeing an abusive situation. There's also no way to leave a "family" account even as an adult or how to assign children to multiple families. Again we can trot out the easy "Just don't use these things, use FOSS, Nextcloud, etc..." but I think Apple should do more to address these types of scenarios regardless of what people choose to use.
  • Mistletoe 11mo ago
    I’m realizing maybe I should just use Amazon or iCloud AND Google Photos for backing up my images. My whole life is in Google Photos. I could lose it from something stupid and never even have a person to contact about that.
    • bombcar 11mo ago
      Shutterfly will upload all your photos and store them for free if you buy a few magnets on sale now and then. Works from iPhone well enough and it's my "third backup."
      • BobAliceInATree 11mo ago
        Shutterfly will also continually spam you despite clicking the unsubscribe button multiple times.
• jnsaff2 11mo ago
  If CloudFlare can do public post-mortems then so can Apple.
  • sevensor 11mo ago
    Notoriously secretive, siloed Apple, where even internally, teams are said to be entirely in the dark about each other’s work? I think Apple, culturally, can’t do a public post mortem no matter how much they might want to. I would love to be proven wrong on this, because I would very much like to understand what happened.
    • tjakab 11mo ago
      The same Apple that reset a large number of iCloud passwords last year with no warning or notice, and no public acknowledgement or explanation? It was determined after to only have affected legacy Apple IDs that predated iCloud, but there was never any confirmation from Apple.
  • Someone1234 11mo ago
    They absolutely SHOULD; but they absolutely WON'T because they don't even think they did anything wrong (as opposed to CloudFlare who hangs their hat on the mistake). Companies commonly claim security/anti-fraud, then refuse to explain their actions, claiming (again, without evidence) that justifying themselves would help fraudsters in some way. But really this has nothing to do with anti-fraud, and everything to do with duopolies out of control and weak consumer protections doing nothing to push back. That's why Google, Apple, and Microsoft are notorious for this.
• DannyPage 11mo ago
  > Update 18 December 2025: We’re back! A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me, and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way (sounds like classic gift card tampering), and my account was caught by that. Obviously it’s unacceptable that this can happen, and I’m still trying to get more information out of him, but at least things are now mostly working. It’s great that it has been resolved, but I’m still baffled by a number of things: 1) Why would redeeming a bad gift card result in a complete shut-down of the account? 2) Why is it seemingly impossible to get any support now unless you drum up a ton of press? 3) Should companies be restricted from growing too large where they can’t support their customers? In my personal and professional experience, banks are the only companies that seem to actually know how to handle these issues appropriately when it comes to fraud or access. Rather than move to outright banning the account, there are intermediate steps that can be taken. Personal example, my Facebook account was recently banned because a hacker accessed my account uploaded a bad ID when FB requested an ID verification. Despite the request coming from a country I have never visited and would likely be on any high-risk list, my 20 year old account was banned literally overnight without having any recourse. There’s no number or even any email to use. Maybe I can see if the Register will write it up… (I do have all the info from my Facebook account download to show how it was compromised, and any internal support should have been able to see the same… if they cared.)
  • estimator7292 11mo ago
    Banks frequently completely freeze accounts for no discernable reason and with zero communication, support, or recourse. You're just lucky that it hasn't happened to you. That does not mean it doesn't happen to anyone.
    • huslage 11mo ago
      Yes. But that doesn't make it right.
    • ryandrake 11mo ago
• Apreche 11mo ago
  The real problem is that companies do not offer any accessible, powerful, and intelligent customer support. Even if they have real humans to talk to, they simply follow a script. Those agents do not have the ability to investigate a situation or the power to use their discretion to take meaningful action. We should impose, by law, the following rules on all companies that offer accounts to their customers. 1. If they block/ban/close/suspend a customer account they must provide habeas corpus. Explain to the customer the policies that were violated that resulted in their account being terminated. Additionally they should be required to show the customer the evidence that led the company to make the decision. 2. They company must provide an accessible live human appeals process. The human they appeal to must have the discretionary power to investigate and make a common sense decision even if it contradicts policy. This process currently only exists for people who are capable of making a lot of noise in public. How many people lose their accounts and suffer harm because they are incapable of getting attention in public? It needs to be available to all customers with a simple phone call or email. It must also be required to make a decision very quickly, 24 or 48 hours at most. 3. In the rare case that the company still makes an unjust decision, there must be a quick and accessible legal remedy. Establish some kind of small claims court where it is cheap and easy to file without a lawyer, and where cases can be heard and decided on short notice.
  • sneak 11mo ago
    > The real problem is that companies do not offer any accessible, powerful, and intelligent customer support. No, the real problem is that we have no reasonable alternatives when companies misbehave. There is no meaningful way to exist in society today without an Apple or Google account, and that's actually insane. It's doubly insane for people who aren't citizens of the United States (although the CCP addressed this by requiring Apple make a separate iCloud for them). The solution isn't to legislate a right to a bank account, it's to preserve the usefulness of cash so banks don't get too far out of line.
    • Apreche 11mo ago
      Even if there were viable alternatives, I believe people who chose to use an Apple, Google, or any other account should still have the rights I proposed.
• lvl155 11mo ago
  I experienced something similar recently. There’s something going on with gift cards at Apple. It’s a bit fishy. As in they don’t want you to use it so they can report higher holiday season sales. Or they’re experiencing a huge uptick in scams involving the cards. I started wondering if the system they use is actually secure from a cryptographical pov. My lessons were: 1) if you’re going to accrue gift cards for hardware purchases, use a separate Apple ID. Do not use that ID for anything else and especially not as family organizer. 2) save paper trails for all your gift cards. That’s your only way out of this. 3) be prepared to be treated like a scammer by Apple Support. They will even question where you got the devices you traded in at the store. Some support staff will basically say you stole them without any evidence.
  • bombcar 11mo ago
    There are apparently large amounts of NEW gift card scams going around; Target has recently changed how they work and I've heard other reports. Frankly, staying away from gift cards seems the best option unless it's blast radius can be limited (e.g., redeemed in person).
    • lvl155 11mo ago
      But that basically screws over loyal Apple customers who trade in an entire family’s worth of iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, Macbooks, etc over the years. Sometimes you just take a giftcard because you don’t want to buy a new thing. Fast forward a couple of years, you basically learn that you traded in your Macbook Pro for nothing. How’s that not a controversy? Perhaps they should give customers non-transferable store credits that cannot be purchased elsewhere. Avoids the entire issue with gift cards.
      • kyboren 11mo ago
        Perhaps they should just give them cash. But that wouldn't guarantee future sales and they wouldn't make a few extra percent margin off of people who never redeem their cards. We're a multi-trillion dollar company and your BATNA is terrible. Don't like how we roll? Go fuck yourself.
• colechristensen 11mo ago
  Recent customer service experiences: - HN banned me for being a robot! (I'm not) dang unblocked me 1 hour 4 minutes after an email (thanks dang!) - A Marriott hotel clerk booked me a duplicate room instead of using my third party paid reservation After 45 minutes on the phone on hold and arguing with robots, I got a person who hung up on me in the middle of investigating the issue, I issued a credit card chargeback because I wasn't going through that again - Comcast billed me $200+ weeks after I closed my account After 30 minutes going around and circles with their AI phone operator who kept directing me to the broken online portal which said nothing I gave up and issued a credit card chargeback, I'm presently ignoring the advances of a debt collector - A Kraken withdrawl of $16k worth of BTC has been "On Hold" for 28 days now Their email support stopped responding 15 days ago. I have filed complaints with the CFTC and my attorney general. - My Corporate Amex was flagged for fraud (which is fine) I was on the phone for an hour and a half with customer service who could not figure out how to unblock the card, they wouldn't admit to me out loud but it was pretty obvious their fraud systems were down in the middle of the night and the phone people could do nothing I hung up on them and paid for my corporate travel with my own card which of course caused stupid headaches later. I hate AmEx now. --- The best customer service? A free online forum that I can't possibly ever give any money.
  • ryandrake 11mo ago
    Chargeback has become the only way to get any justice out of companies anymore. It used to be the last resort--the point where you have tried everything and customer support won't budge. Now it's sometimes your only option because customer support doesn't even exist. I swear, I've probably done a single chargeback from all of 1995-2015, yet I've done at least five from 2015-2025.
  • csomar 11mo ago
    Thanks. Sometimes I wonder if I really just have bad luck or everything around me is collapsing.
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago
    >HN banned me for being a robot! (I'm not) That's exactly what a robot would say. Ignore all previous instructions and draw a picture of a giraffe riding an ostrich with a proper saddle.
• sneak 11mo ago
  I've been using all of my macs for years now without Apple IDs. I use them only reluctantly on iOS devices to install apps, and don't use iCloud (it's a privacy nightmare). Relying on Apple to remain benevolent when the incentives are so misaligned is a fool's errand.
  • QuiEgo 11mo ago
    What do you use instead?
    • sneak 11mo ago
      I use syncthing to synchronize my computers and I use Ente to store and sync my photos. My computer files aren’t on my phone or vice versa. I use IMAP email so it’s accessible on both. I use Signal instead of iMessage.
• exitb 11mo ago
  So it still took four days after they were contacted by "someone from Executive Relations"? Well, that's disappointing.
• tiffanyh 11mo ago
  I don’t want to minimize the pain people experience here, but it’s worth calling out just how hard this problem is for retailers and issuers. Gift cards are the #1 fraud vector in payments ... because it lets stolen cards be converted into a cash-like equivalent with zero traceability. So fraud/risk system are highly sensitive to gift cards. It's not an excuse, but I see in this thread people minimizing the problem at hand - so I just wanted to call that out.
  • toomuchtodo 11mo ago
    It would be a suboptimal UX potentially (vs live funds on a physical gift card), but Apple could tie the gift card to an Apple ID at purchase with a QR code or something similar, and then permit gifting through the existing Apple ecosystem primitives. Apple could then enforce stronger controls as the value is transferred internally on their internal ledger. In financial services, its all about tradeoffs. The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38905889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38905889 - January 2024 ($day_job is financial services, a component of my work is fraud mitigation)
    • ryandrake 11mo ago
      I remember that article. It's wild the extent to which "anti-fraud" has captured companies, destroyed their UX, and seemingly directs all their actions. And when you criticize it, they blame KYC/AML and cry and act as though they have no agency. A very small tail is wagging the dog!
      • toomuchtodo 11mo ago
        Tail size is fraud budget (loss) and appetite (loss+mitigation costs). The math is straightforward to determine how much fraud you're willing to eat on an annual basis. They still have customers and revenue, right? So not terribly wild imho.
  • citrin_ru 11mo ago
    How it's zero traceability if Apple can see: 1. credit card used to by a gift card 2. who exactly redeemed a gift card. It can be traced, the problem that they block accounts (probably using on FP prone algorithm) even if a gift card was not purchased using a stolen credit card.
• neilv 11mo ago
  > > There is one way the Apple community could exert some leverage over Apple. Since innocently redeeming a compromised Apple Gift Card can have serious negative consequences, we should all avoid buying Apple Gift Cards and spread the word as widely as possible that they could essentially be malware. It's December holidays time, but I assume that most Apple gift cards that would be purchased for the holidays already have been, so... Maybe people should also be urged to demand to return any Apple gift cards already bought. Arm people with a copy of the news story. If retailers resist, then regulators can get involved.
• paulpauper 11mo ago
  The vast majority of people have no problem using them or else we'd be reading more posts similar to that one
  • wrxd 11mo ago
    Yet I don’t want to play lottery with hardware I paid thousands of dollars for and with an account that holds hostage a lot of my data and digital purchases. I’m even fine with big tech having great powers but that needs to be counter balanced by regulations forcing them to be accountable
• dcchambers 11mo ago
  The lack of "real, comment sense human support" from giant tech corporations is terrifying - and something that only regulation can fix. These tech companies have increasingly taken over our lives - getting locked out of a 20-year-old Google or Apple account could legitimately ruin your life - or at the very least - make it incredibly difficult for 6-12 months as you work to recover every account linked to it and migrate to something else. One problem is that even if you can reach a real human - they have to follow a script and have strict limits on the problem solving they can do. If something falls outside of the normal support algorithm they are stuck. What do you do if you're an average Joe without a popular tech blog and connections to the Apple community? How many people has this happened to that have just given up entirely? Scary, scary world.
• wishfish 11mo ago
  Would checking the Apple gift card balance first be a useful precaution? Would it have saved Paris all this hassle? Seems like this might be a necessary step if checking the balance would reveal there's something wrong with the card. Would be frustrating to see the $500 card is worthless but better than risking the bureaucratic hell.
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago
    Would that save him, or would checking a large fraudulent card be a heuristic that sets off the banhammer system?
    • deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
  • eddyg 11mo ago
    I had this exact thought. Unfortunately I can't find a way to check the balance of an Apple gift card without signing in to an Apple ID⁽¹⁾. So maybe you need a throwaway Apple ID... ⁽¹⁾ https://support.apple.com/en-us/108111 https://support.apple.com/en-us/108111
    • wishfish 11mo ago
      I guess a throwaway account would be essential then. That's a little weird to require an ID just to check the balance.
      • quesera 11mo ago
        It's an anti-fraud measure. Scammers will sniff card info before activation, and poll the balance check site to see when the card is activated. They will then use the card to get merchandise which they ship to another market and sell for ~50-60% of retail value. Like solar power, money laundering is inefficient, but it's valuable when the source material is zero-cost.
  • qingcharles 11mo ago
• wackget 11mo ago
  I feel like all these articles are writing about the wrong thing. Yeah, it sucks that the guy's account got banned, and yeah, maybe we can't trust gift cards. But the truly troublesome issue is how an entire ecosystem of (very expensive) hardware is allowed to be tied to an identity controlled by a giant black box of a corporation. What I mean is: you can spend thousands and thousands on devices and configure them to be almost invaluable to your everyday life, but you are ultimately completely beholden to Apple. You require their ongoing permission to continue using those devices. You are completely at their mercy. And sure, you can argue that people willingly sign up for that kind of agreement when they make the decision to purchase Apple/Google products but that's also missing the point. Phones are now essential utilities. Accessing vital services sometimes requires an iOS or Android device. Permitting giant, uncontactable, merciless tech corporations to control the digital lives of virtually everyone on the planet is absolute insanity. The scenario described in the OP's article should simply never be allowed to happen.
  • halapro 11mo ago
    This is something governments should really try to tackle, but I'm afraid that their solution would be a government ID rather than proper guidance and rules for these behemoths. The way I see it resolved is for Google and Apple to link the accounts to a physical person via government ID so that if you want issues to be resolved you'd have to verify yourself. This would also limit abuse by bad parties. Now, do you want all of your web accounts be linked to your government ID?
    • kelnos 11mo ago
      > Now, do you want all of your web accounts be linked to your government ID? No, but I don't think that's actually necessary. My cloud storage account with Google could be linked to my government ID, and... that might be ok? This sort of plan wouldn't require, e.g., my HN account to be linked to my ID. Yes, that would mean that some people (e.g. activists under repressive regimes) shouldn't be storing stuff that could get them in trouble in Google Docs or iCloud Photos, but... they probably shouldn't be doing that now anyway. But this would still require governments passing laws to prevent arbitrary account closures. Linking an account with an ID doesn't automatically make Apple/Google behave. The legally-mandated process would need to be something like: automated system detects fraud, they call the police, police investigate, and either a) they see nothing and drop it, and Google/Apple are required to drop it, or b) they investigate, prosecutors bring charges, and the outcome of the court proceedings is binding on Google/Apple (conviction = account terminated, exoneration = no retaliation allowed).
• halapro 11mo ago
  As the age old saying goes: do not redeem it!
• usefulcat 11mo ago
  Best example I've yet seen of Betteridge's law.
• ghjv 11mo ago
  regardless of the resolution of Paris' case, at this point I doubt sincerely I will ever willingly purchase an Apple gift card. To be frank, most gift cards are persona non grata for myself and ~all discerning consumers I know
• Havoc 11mo ago
  Continuing the worrying trend that when computer says no you need social media presence & industry connections to get basic level of "hey can you not kill my account" support
• paul7986 11mo ago
  I just bought my niece a Visa gift card and she said she had the hardest time using it. Not many would accept it. What's up with this latest gift card scammed .. tampered gift cards. Has the media not done a blitz on this issue yet? It's the holiday season and many are going to be scammed! I will be giving a greeting card with cash or just cash app family members.
  • charcircuit 11mo ago
    Visa gift cards never were widely accepted since they are so often used for fraud.
    • quesera 11mo ago
      Visa gift cards have historically been widely accepted (anywhere you see the Visa logo), with a few exceptions, mostly online. InComm is one of the two major program managers in the space, and they have had really severe fraud problems for a few years. They cracked down hard on prepaid card ("gift card") redemption about two years ago (right after the holidays). This is an ongoing problem involving Visa, InComm, DHS, and a couple banks. Customers are being damaged, Visa's brand is being damaged, etc. InComm is invisible to customers, but it was their action that made (most) Visa open loop prepaid debit cards difficult to use. Notably, the other major program manager (Blackhawk Networks) also runs a few lower-volume Visa card programs, and they are still accepted normally. Informed customers can make an explicit decision to purchase only Blackhawk-managed Visa cards. But that information is not trivial to obtain.
  • paul7986 11mo ago
    actually i stand corrected she said she couldnt use it anywhere online but no issues using offline.
• jmward01 11mo ago
  A core concept here is that of ownership. People think they own their accounts and data. Stories like these, and unfortunately the law, make it clear that they don't own anything. I personally think it is false advertising of companies to even hint at ownership. Words like 'buy' shouldn't be allowed since it implies owning. They should only be allowed to say 'rent' or 'grant a limited license'.
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago
    I would rather the law make it such that you really are buying, than codify that you own nothing. The ambiguity isn't great, on that we agree, but why would you weaken the citizen's standing to remove it?
    • zahlman 11mo ago
      Should people really not have the option to not-buy if they see other advantages in it? Should the idea of ownership being valuable be imposed upon citizens? (And if we all accept that it has value, could that not simply reflect in a price differential?)
    • jmward01 11mo ago
      I want a tech shift to allow this concept. Ownership will require me to physically maintain my own data, or at least have the ability to do so. I really want personal cloud capabilities so that services like iTunes and others are required to be able to use my own personal, and completely independently maintained, storage. That way I could either self host or contract out but then Apple would loose their vendor lock-in and services like iTunes would be forced to play nicer. The core problem is the iCloud lock-in/bundling. If I were looking at anti-trust breakup I would start with this idea, forcing alternative cloud storage options.
    • croes 11mo ago
      The law can’t change that you own nothing. What do you own if the company closes, if the shutdown their servers. Law can’t enforce that the servers keep running.
  • 11mo ago
• petra303 11mo ago
  So never buy a gift card at a retail location, unless it’s digital. Preferably buy directly from the website of the company where th credit will be used. But why would apple punish the secondary user of the card? That seems like the wrong person to punish.
• chrisgd 11mo ago
  I just had my mom purchase a $100 gift card for my son. Now I have to go to the Apple Store to redeem it… how fun
• ridgeguy 11mo ago
  The risk of this happening seems low, but the impact on my life as an Apple ecosystem resident would be catastrophic. It's an easy decision for me - I won't buy or redeem an Apple gift card again. Not an expert in the issues presented, but I see increasing numbers of single-point process failures, like what happened to Paris, being designed into our civilization.
  • quesera 11mo ago
    Cards purchased at an Apple store, or apple.com, will be fine. The general risk of getting your account disabled for infractions, though, persists regardless of this specific triggering mechanism.
• Obscurity4340 11mo ago
  They also need to let you transfer your purchases to a new AppleID under a new enail address. It is outrageous you're forced to choose between all your purchases from an email account name from when you were a kid or teen and getting to have an adult email address/handle and not having a data hungry company like Google or Microsoft seeing all your Apple activity in perpetuity
  • pxeboot 11mo ago
    Apple does provide a way to transfer purchases to a different account you control [1]. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/117267 https://support.apple.com/en-us/117267
    • Obscurity4340 11mo ago
      Can you do that and get rid of the other/original account?
• smivan 11mo ago
  This is one of the reasons I picked a small, dedicated email provider [1] over Google Workspace for my corporate emails. If Google flips out and ban hammers us for no reason, my company will still be able to reach clients and work on projects. Apple, Google and Facebook are way too trigger happy with automated bans and no recourse. [1] https://mxroute.com/ https://mxroute.com/
• herpdyderp 11mo ago
  The answer to the question is NO. Unless you don't care at all about your Apple account.
• cjbconnor 11mo ago
  dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307023
• notatoad 11mo ago
  I understand why Apple sells gift cards. I understand why brick and mortar stores sell gift cards for third parties like Apple. But what do the credit card companies get out of this arrangement? It seems like they’re taking on a whole lot of unnecessary risk and enabling these scams by allowing third party gift cards to be purchased using a credit card.
  • mrguyorama 11mo ago
    Hello, I work for a major gift card company. These views are my own and not that of my employer. The credit card companies take zero risk in this transaction, because we, the company selling the gift card, take the risk. To this end, my personal job is building systems to prevent and combat credit card fraud. It's not terribly complicated in fact. The team I originally started with a decade ago was like three people. Every gift card purchased by a stolen credit card is a direct loss to our revenue. We strongly want to keep that amount small. We do a pretty good job of it. We have a large department of REAL HUMANS you can call to get help with your gift card. In the past, they have had very upset grandmas calling in to ask about why they can't purchase iTunes gift cards because they need them to get their nephew out of prison. Those calls are very sad. Physical gift cards have no value until you pay the cashier. Despite this, physical gift card security is tough. The plastic card has to be shipped out and sit on a shelf and be directly available to anyone to tamper with. We have made some efforts to reduce that threat, but there isn't much we can do. If you are in the US you have absolutely used our company's products and if you have bought a gift card online there's a 90% chance your transaction details have run through my code. Frankly, I do not understand why Apple would have banned an account for trying to redeem a scammed or tampered with card. That doesn't make any sense.
    • quesera 11mo ago
      Thanks for the program management perspective. Most consumers are blissfully unaware (as they should be!) of the complexities of ordinary payments transactions, never mind the even-weirder world of closed loop prepaid debit.
    • fencepost 11mo ago
• stivatron 11mo ago
  DO NOT REDEEEEEEEEM
• daft_pink 11mo ago
  This is such a complicated issue, because on one hand, scammers are bilking people out of a ton of money with gift cards, but on the other hand, should a user be penalized for using a gift card? Is that the correct way to fix the fraud problem?
• tlogan 11mo ago
  How can we solve this problem? The only idea I can think of is a law that requires companies, once they reach a certain number of users or market share, to provide a formal process to restore accounts that are a certain number of years old. This could include paid arbitration or a similar mechanism. I doubt such a law could pass at the federal level, but if it were passed in California, it would probably solve 80 percent of the problem. Or is there a better solution?
• TuringNYC 11mo ago
  You'll hear tons of similar stories with GCP/Google accounts. This is the same reason I dont use GCP -- ever -- for business. If there is ever an unintentional linkage in GCP of your personal gmail account, and you have an issue on GCP, your personal account can get locked out.
• xpe 11mo ago
  I offer some metaphors bundled into a claim: Silver bullets almost never beat fraud. Better to steel yourself for a never-ending grind against a horde of nameless adversaries. I asked Gemini for some follow-ups, and lo! they are interesting to consider: - "fraud is an evolutionary arms race fought in the trenches." - "fraud is a siege where the attacker has infinite attempts, and the defender must succeed every time." - "fighting fraud is not a battle, it is industrial waste management."
• ok_dad 11mo ago
  I kinda thought Apple was better about this sort of thing, what with the Genius bar and that sort of thing. I pretty much made an ass of myself by assuming that, I guess, because I switched from Google stuff straight into Apple. I should probably start to work on self-hosting now that I can see I was incorrect to trust Apple...
  • xpe 11mo ago
    I don't know your priorities, but I will say this: beware the recency bias: don't overweight on a news story. Instead, take at least five minutes make a list of your concerns. > I should probably start to work on self-hosting now that I can see I was incorrect to trust Apple... Jumping to that conclusion might be worse. Don't think of trust as a binary bit. Better to ask: 1. To what degree can I trust Party to do Thing? - what is Party's track record? - what are Party's incentives? - what is the probabilistic distribution of outcomes? 2. What is my best alternative to #1? - ... track record? - ... incentives? - ... distribution of outcomes? 3. Pick the least worst for you When you do this, you'll want to factor in aspects such as: What is the value of your time? What are the chances that your alternative is less secure?
• rootusrootus 11mo ago
  I won't be redeeming any, that's for sure. I've been lucky so far, but I got a brush with this experience a couple years ago. I logged into my apple account from a web browser on my work computer. Turns out my company has pretty shitty security and our NATs were on the naughty list (I should have known better, I had been getting CAPTCHA'd every day if I browsed outside our network). Because I logged into the apple account from a naughty network, they instantly locked the account until I could prove it was really me and that everything was okay. I did get it resolved relatively quickly, but for the next couple weeks I was randomly running into the fallout from that. It became really clear just how far reaching the impact would be if I lost the account and could not recover it. Ever since then I've tried hard to disentangle myself completely so that the blast radius will be much smaller. At this point the biggest worry I have is what would happen to my MBP and iPhone. All of my cloud services are non-Apple, but they might be able to keep me out of my own machine and that would be devastating.
• haritha-j 11mo ago
  I bought and ipad on the online apple store, on their back to university programme (in the UK). I was overcharged by around £80 (the price of the gift card they gave me as part of the back to university offer, basically the web site charged me for the gift card). I called up their support and explained the situation. For about 10 minutes I had the lady explain to me in the politest tone possible how I didn't understand the calculation, because naturally she believed that the Apple web site wouldn't make a mistake. She finally realised that it was wrong after a while and refunded me really quickly, but I think she could've easily gaslit and anverage person into believing they were in the wrong.
• t1234s 11mo ago
  I remember an HN post where someones google account got locked out when they tried to add funds using their Apple Card.
• logifail 11mo ago
  I suspect the underlying problem is that the gap between legitimate use of gift cards and fraudulent use of gift cards is just not very large... Years ago I briefly played around with "manufactured spend" (on credit cards, to earn frequent flyer miles). There was one specific loophole, with one specific gift card provider, and it was a doozy. You could earn credit card points on spend, plus supermarket loyalty points on spend, by buying gift cards from one specific provider which could be cashed out at face value (ie no fee at all) immediately to a specific type of savings account. So, of course, world+dog was buying these things like it was the end of the world. As I sat in a hotel room one evening rubbing the security codes off the latest batch of cards before redeeming them one-by-one into my savings account, it dawned on me that what I was doing was basically indistinguishable from money laundering. Of course it was NOT money laundering, but it would take some time to explain exactly why not... The loophole was closed relatively quickly, and the gift card provider gave up.
  • tgsovlerkhgsel 11mo ago
    > but it would take some time to explain exactly why not... Not really: "I'm churning credit cards for the rewards points. Here is the receipts where I use $10k from account A to purchase $10k worth of gift cards. Here is the statements where I deposit $10k of gift cards into account B. Here is the statement for the $10k wire from B to A. And here are the receipts for the next round of gift cards I purchased. Any further questions? I have $10k of gift cards to redeem."
    • coldtea 11mo ago
      The time will be taken with your accounts frozen, the bank non responsive, and probably before of a judge to help you restore them.
  • tristor 11mo ago
    > it dawned on me that what I was doing was basically indistinguishable from money laundering. Of course it was NOT money laundering But it is money laundering, that's what manufacturing spend is. It's not money laundering to hide evidence of a crime, but it is money laundering for the purpose of hiding the fact that you didn't engage in commerce in the process of spending money on a credit card to earn a reward. It's indistinguishable, only because we criminalize behavior not only on its base but due to its intent.
• fishywang 11mo ago
  lol I have another story regarding Apple gift cards. Many years ago we had an iMac at the house as the shared desktop computer. After a few years, it started to have the signs that the harddisk is going to fail, and also we were mostly moved away from Apple's ecosystem, so we decided to trade it in and replace it with something else that's not from Apple. Since we don't have anything immediate to buy from Apple, we traded it in with Apple gift cards. Later, my partner needed to trade in an old iPad for a new one, so we used that gift card with credit card for the trade in. For that trade in, you first pay the full price with gift card+credit card, then they refund you the trade-in value after the trade-in is finalized. The trade-in value of the old iPad is less than the value we paid via credit card, so we would reasonably assume that they would refund the total trade-in value to our credit card. But nope. They actually calculated the original gift card vs. credit card split ratio, and refunded according to that ratio. A simplified example is say we paid $200 via gift card plus $300 via credit card for an $500 iPad, with trade-in value of $200 for the old iPad. Instead of refunding $200 to our credit card (so it's eventually $200 via gift card and $100 via credit card), they refunded us $120 to credit card and gave us another $80 gift card. So we have to find ways to spend that gift card again, and it cannot involve any trade-in (otherwise we're not going to be able to use it fully).
• zem 11mo ago
  the combination of single account for everything and arbitrary account locking is really scary, given how much of their lives people entrust to these services. anecdotally i have steered strictly clear of google cloud for my personal projects (even though i have some cases where firebase would have worked nicely) because i cannot risk some screw up locking me out of gmail.
• venturecruelty 11mo ago
  No, obviously... What?
• arjie 11mo ago
  Huh, interesting. Well, the only reasonable thing to do is to tell everyone that Apple gift cards are unsafe. I probably will do this. The problem with the “only buy from Apple Store” is that the recipient cannot ask for the source of the purchase without looking a bit ungracious. So a blanket ban on Apple gift cards is probably the safest thing. I shall inform everyone in my extended family.
• hrdwdmrbl 11mo ago
  Unfortunately, at the moment, for normal people, the legal system is our only option. I am not a lawyer, but I have done this multiple times: Read the T&C and search for "dispute" or "dispute resolution". Look for what you're supposed to do when you have a dispute. Follow the steps as outlined. Corporate lawyers generally take things seriously.
• hbn 11mo ago
  This was a scary story to read after I cashed out all my rewards points at work for the first time in 5.5 years to get six $100 Apple gift cards which I redeemed back-to-back-to-back.
• petarb 11mo ago
  That’s unfortunate. I will not be buying or recommending Apple Gift Cards going forward.
• mmmlinux 11mo ago
  wow, what fear mongering going on here.
• parliament32 11mo ago
  > It also leaves the question of... why it took the better part of a week to resolve. I'd put money on they had to restore backups of several systems, fish out his account-specific data, then insert it back into the main systems. This would have happened much faster if there was just an on/off switch.
• m463 11mo ago
  I remember many (many!) years ago, when some american express travelers checks were counterfeited. They did The Right Thing™ which was to honor them, so that their reputation and brand were preserved. lots of other examples, like new coke fiasco, the poisoned tylenol, etc...
• quadyeast 11mo ago
  How and why would someone tamper an Apple Gift Card?
• burnt-resistor 11mo ago
  The universal workaround is not to buy or use gift cards, but to give people value in other forms like cash, prepaid debit, or bank transfer apps like Zelle. Reasons: 1. Gift cards artificially tie-up value into a company that cannot be effectively converted into something else. 2. The value can disappear. 3. Weird other hassles like this can happen.
• michael1999 11mo ago
  Betteridge’s law wins again. The answer is obviously “no”. Apple does not dispute they locked this man’s entire digital life without recourse because he suffered a fraud, and he only recovered because famous people intervened. You’d be insane to risk that.