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Comment by tehwebguy

5 years ago

Quote from this, including typos: "I will need to changed your card number for your security and protection. Since Apple Pay was used, you will need to changed your Apple ID password."

Whaaaaat?

9 comments

tehwebguy

Reply
ayewo  5 years ago

If you read till the end, you'll realize that the original support request was framed in a way that caused the agent to assume the customer was reporting a fraud or account compromise.

It was only down in the chain, around November, when the customer mentioned that they may have accidentally signed up for a WaPo subscription (due to dark patterns), and not that their account was compromised.

By then it was too late, as Apple had already applied the nuclear option of a password reset, to keep the customer's account secure.

  • breck  5 years ago

    To be honest I don't remember signing up for the account. The fact that Apple Pay was used makes me think somehow I did it on my phone by accident. I do read the WaPo on occasion, so that sounds like the most likely scenario. And they are full of dark patterns, which I guess Apple at least tacitly supports.

    But PayPal's had that see and control your subscriptions ability for many years and it's embarrassing for Apple to not have that at this point. And then to nuke the account creds was crazy. And then the fact that I was literally texting with the agent on the phone # that they were trying to text to verify the account, and I was getting nothing, was crazy. And the fact that they couldn't override. And then the fact that while waiting for a verification code that never arrived, they booted me from support. And then the fact that the next agent had zero context, crazy. And then on and on. And then that's before all the phone calls! It's sort of like I think they are trolling me.

    • madeofpalk  5 years ago

      > But PayPal's had that see and control your subscriptions ability for many years and it's embarrassing for Apple to not have that at this point

      They do. Any subscriptions that Apple bills for are all visible in a single list. But Apple Pay or Apple's Credit Card is not PayPal. They're not compariable products.

      The "problem" here is that these are just charges to your credit card. Paypal is not a credit card (well, ignoring their credit products, but I presume that's not what you're talking about), its not a like-for-like comparison.

      I don't think it's commonplace for a bank to show a list of subscriptions for a credit card - that's not how banking infrastructure works (I don't think) for credit card transations. By bank does have a feature where it guesses recurring payments to help me plan, but it's not an actual subscription in the way that Direct Debits, or App Store, or Paypal subscriptions are.

    • zwkrt  5 years ago

      How would Apple pull subscriptions off? Centrally manageable subscriptions are a part of the PayPal product API, not of general finance. How is your credit card supposed to understand if a recurring payment is due to a subscription or a regular habit?

      1 reply →

    • zwkrt  5 years ago

      How would Apple pull that off? Centrally manageable subscriptions are a part of the PayPal product API, not of general finance. How is your credit card supposed to understand if a recurring payment is due to a subscription or a regular habit?

avereveard  5 years ago

I think support personnel belief while going off their script (as he picked #4 I didn't do the transaction) was that someone guessed/hijacked is apple account and stated using it to buy things on the internet, and that's what derailed the whole support ticket.

they immediately switched gear from support request into a security request, which pumps all the brakes on your account. I'm unfamiliar with apple, but banks will react more or less the same with insured credit cards, because they're the one on the hooks for any fraudulent purchase.