Comment by x3sphere

The only “use cases” I’ve seen are discount or niche. For example, Target and Bass Pro Shops/Cabelas in the US both offered some kind of 5 or 10 percent back/discount around Black Friday on gift cards. Niche would fall into, generally, some small enough business that these messes aren’t likely to happen, where the point of the gift is specifically later-consumption, like a local coffee place that you know someone loves, or say a specialty herbs and spices place for a cook (where you wouldn’t know exactly what they want from there, but that they WOULD be delighted to get something from the place).

Otherwise? Yeah. Gift / prepaid credit cards are a horrible scam, because they tend to have a percentage or, worse, flat fee to activate. $4 extra on a $50 card as a gift means you just paid 8 percent just to GET the card.

You can give your postal carrier a gift card but they're not allowed to accept cash or a prepaid card. https://about.usps.com/postal-bulletin/2012/pb22349/html/cov...

> you should probably just give them cash

I really wish this was more acceptable. Even I have this block in giving just plain cash as a gift.

It's company scrip for Boomers.

>, how would they know what my Apple account is until they’re redeemed?

To add context, your reddit post also mentioned: >, I purchased eleven Apple Gift cards from [...], and apple.com, and added the amounts to my Apple account.

I'm not saying the following applies to you but one can buy Apple Gift Cards using their Apple ID. After adding gift cards to the ecommerce shopping bag on Apple.com, it offers the option : "Check out with your Apple Account"

So Apple would know the exact AppleID at the time-of-sale instead of waiting until redemption. If for some reason Apple's fraud detection system doesn't like the transaction (e.g. unusual ip address from Mexico instead of USA, or too many high-value cards in a certain time period, or other black-box opaque heuristic) ... then the buyer puts their Apple account at risk.

Fraud prevention heuristics are insanely aggresive these days...

Last week, I bought a Netflix subscription and 5 days later, Netflix cancelled the membership for no apparent reason. I got on a customer support chat with Netflix and the agent said it was cancelled because of the credit-card #. It didn't pass their fraud prevention system and to try using another card. At least Netflix automatically refunded the entire amount back to me -- whereas Apple keeps the gift card balance for itself after locking accounts.

In another incident, I used a Chase credit-card at a physical Apple store to buy 2 iPhones on 2 separate receipts. The first iPhone sale was a success. The 2nd iPhone transaction just 1 minute later was denied and Chase locked the entire account. I had to call Chase customer service and recite the make & model of a car I had 20 years ago to prove my identity for them to re-activate the credit card!

My recommendation is to completely drop the Apple ecosystem, however painful it is. I do use an iPhone but I treat it as just a phone. If Apple locks me out I dgaf.

I’m not trying to be rude, but what is the point of buying and then redeeming gift cards yourself?

I just pay Apple with my credit card when I want to buy something. Is this some kind of weird credit card rewards churning thing? Are you unbanked? I don’t understand why you’d voluntarily add unnecessary extra steps.

A credit card offers far more protections to consumers than a gift card.

Given the amount of false positives, Apple should have an appeal process for innocent users to regain access to their accounts. It would be nice if this applied to all big tech companies, losing an email address can make other accounts difficult or impossible to access.

This is a problem with modern life in general. Computing and the internet have exploded the complexity of society. Regular people have so much on their plate as it is (school, work, family, mortgage, etc) that they simply cannot keep up with all of the privacy and security risks of a digital life. They also can't keep up with the complexity of politics and civic life, but that's another discussion entirely!

> You'd think so. Yet, the stories of PayPal locking up payouts to surprised people keep coming every year - and people still use them.

At least in Europe, PayPal is a regulated bank which means you can hand the case over to the authorities and they can and will help you out.

I think tech people who read a lot of news headlines have a hard time grasping the scale of these services.

Commenters here talk about PayPal account closures as if everyone who uses the service will eventually lose their money. Now we're talking about gift cards as if everyone using gift cards will have their account locked.

These stories, while frustrating and sad, are rare occurrences. The majority of people who use these services will not have any experience like these stories you read.

To be honest, I think the average person is probably better at estimating their risk of using these services than a lot of these HN commenters.

I thought I'd buy Cory Doctrow's Enshittification ebook direct from his website. Surprised to be redirected to Paypal with no other option.

That's so much not a fitting comparison.

The most money I have ever had on my PayPal account was 100 bucks from a reversed transaction (like, double booking of a hotel room or wrong item sent), otherwise it's just a gateway. It would be annoying if my PayPal account was locked, because I use it a lot to order pizza online and a few small purchases. I could just use my credit card or something else but it's more clicks. And I know a lot of people who do it like this. The only thing lost is convenience. No past purchases, no digital identities.

Maybe you meant the merchants who really amass thousands but I suppose they are a small minority of active users.

I think it's a combination of money laundering and phone scams where people are told they owe money to the IRS or something and are tricked into buying a bunch of gift cards.

That said, if buying and redeeming gift cards are such an indicator of fraud that people are legitimately afraid of getting their accounts permanently locked, why doesn't Apple just stop selling them?

> You do not like person x, send them some Apple gift cards... :o

99.999% chance they happily redeem them and go about their lives.

These stories, while frustrating, are clearly edge cases. Yes I know you can find more if you search social media, but I don’t think a lot of these HN commenters realize the volume of gift cards Apple sells and redeems without problem every day.

In this case buy the gift card from some shady retailer with a one-time-use virtual card, and give this shady code to your friend. Or buy a physical card from aliexpress, the cheapest one with bad reviews.

[flagged]

The newer iPhones have such great cameras, I have have been considering an iPhone for my next phone. The only thing holding me back is the lack of built-in stylus.

Does the iPhone require an Apple ID? I don't even log into my Google account with my Android device. If the phone requires an Apple ID, then obviously I'm not buying one.

Well-spotted.

That includes the original poster! "could have been because I purchased gift cards from the US (online) and added them to my account while I was in Mexico, or I was using a VPN while adding gift cards"

One of the other people was someone who "purchased $2k in apple gift cards from target during Black Friday deals... There was a limit of 1 but if you went in store and were friendly to the cashier a lot of people (myself included) had luck getting them to ring them up as separate transactions".

Pretty sure if the latter person had given those out as separate cards to other people it would have been fine but going from "limit of 1" to "all redeemed by same account" is unsurprising when it triggers a fraud flag.

The big problem in this story as in the past one is the apparent lack of sensible escalation.

I've heard horror stories from Google devs that it's even worse - such a situation follows you for life even if you try to setup new accounts.

This isn’t a solution for many people.

And in fact, a prohibition is never a solution, it is a reduction in solution options

And this advice takes into account exactly zero aspects of the particular problems a given person may have to solve, besides “problems with Apple”, in a world where most people have “problems with X” for each of the few large ecosystems.

Freedom of choice would mean for N choices, being able to make, well, N indepointed choices. N may be a very large number given how many things people do.

For an ideal world of compatible modular technologies, N choices is easy.

But our technology world is highly non-modular, centralized at many levels, and full of incompatibilities and dependencies of various kinds and costs. Including important dependencies involving the choices of other people we interact with, or very specific tools or resources.

So no, “Don’t buy Apple” is not better advice, it is just bad random generic advice, without knowing a lot more about any particular situation.

Like what someone writes books about.

In phones you have a choice of iOS (Apple) or Android (Google). Sure, maybe some people can go back to flip phones, but I can’t without finding a new job.

This is the first I’ve heard of Apple locking someone out of their account for no reason. Google does it all the time. So, yeah, can’t leave Apple over this.

BSD, Linux or TempleOS would never lock you out.

Some cultures stigmatize gifting money, yet gifting corporate scrip is fine.

For the similar reasons Apple sells socks.. maybe?

People love to smugly suggest this useless advice like there aren’t literal public services from governments around the world that are being tied to these platforms, let alone the many private companies which gate access to their goods and services behind apps on proprietary devices.

To say nothing of the fact that well-adjusted humans need to communicate with friends and family, and many times that also practically requires being on these platforms as well.

If it was be that simple. In that case I would have to go to the bank for every transaction/payment I want to initiate online. Banking app doesn't work for jailbroken devices. Using PC to access banks website works, but transactions still require 2FA and they don't support any other 2FA flow except the one in the app.

Or Microsoft.

Stay as far away from BigIT as you can. Linux or BSD are there for many good reasons. This is another one.

I had the misfortune of visiting an Amazon Go store. They charged me for items that I never picked.

No option to contest the receipt....until the "would you recommend a friend visit amazon Go" survey popped up. I responded negatively, then the "why?" question had a "My receipt was incorrect" option.

Suddenly I was able to go through the "contest receipt" workflow.

100% completely automated.

Why did you tell your bank it was delivered, if it was never delivered. Some other item you didn't order was delivered.

The system works as long there is user trust in the system. It is sad and annoying when something like this happens, but occasionally the best thing you can do is tell your story and never use a service again. I find there are still reasonable alternatives to Amazon, maybe not at the same price, but at least they deliver less fakes.

Wow, i received a fake product from Amazon ten years ago, their support gave me a full refund no questions asked. Shame how far they've fallen.

(Fwiw, i never bought anything from Amazon again after receiving one fake item. If i want to gamble I'll pay Aliexpress prices)

Does your country not have a small claims court or equivalent? This is literally what they are for: resolving obvious payment disputes with uncooperative corporations.

When I get bogus products from online ordering I just assume I got ripped off and that's that. A majority of my orders come through though so its not all bad.

Unless you live in a jurisdiction that is known to have very generous court judgements that fully compensate all expenses occured… wouldn’t this be true for literally every dispute you have above a certain threshold?

That’s simply the actual cost of living in your jurisdiction.

I don’t think any large retailer or bank on Earth guarantees there will be a viable escalation pathway for all possible combination of scenarios either.

Maybe a very high end private bank but even that’s iffy.

For all the negative press he gets and the way he treats his workers I'm surprised he still has resources allocated to handle complaints sent to his inbox.

This also works for many other companies by the way - find or guess the email of someone high enough up the management chain and you have a much better chance of your issue ending up with someone who can actually do something about it than phone support following a fixed script. Bottom barrel support options are a choice the company is making and you do not have to play by their rules.

Are you in the US?

I'm just always a little surprised to read things like "i couldn't live without Amazon," and i wonder if there are no other alternatives for two day shipping on other countries or what it is that keeps people stuck on Amazon instead of using other next-day deliveries

If you can…

I think you’re taking the message the wrong way.

Those are the steps the commenter suggests you take to use these services safely.

It’s not that these steps are reasonable.

Yours is an absurd response. Rage-bait? Still, I will bite - kind of.

1. You don’t need too much time to set this up.

2. All this doesn’t have to be in one sitting - with meds and coffee that keeps you awake through the sleeping hours

3. In fact it’s better if you do this over the weeks, months, years. For me it took years and I am still kind of doing it. Once in a while, here and there.

4. I am not very smart. If I was I’d have just ignored your comment.

Nobody believes this is right.

The question is: will you roll over and die without a fight for your rights?

At least you have time you are spending on HN that could be devoted to learning to fight. The fewer people that fight, the faster your rights disappear.

I’ll extend this, seriously, to the 3-2-1 model. It’s all fun and games, rhetorically, until someplace burns down.

I had a family member who had sudden onset of massive seizures. He could not remember any of his passwords or hints at all. It was a real challenge getting into any of his accounts to figure out what needed doing.

See https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

> This is the same failure mode of all security-through-obscurity. Secrecy means that bad guys are privy to defects in systems, while the people who those systems are supposed to defend are in the dark, and can have their defenses weaponized against them.

> I don't think the laws are dictating Apple to completely turn off the accounts, but instead dictate that Apple should take measures against it.

You misunderstand the nature of financial regulation. The laws on things like money laundering are intentionally vague, they say things like "Apple should take measures against it". And financial regulators will not come out and say (especially in writing) that you MUST do any particular thing (like ban customers entirely on suspicion).

What they WILL do is ask probing questions, frown a lot, and make suggestions. Which the company had better take seriously. Because the financial regulators have the ability to simply close down your business, and if you cross enough of the unclear lines they will do so.

All this costs money for little return of invest. As long as the collateral damage is below a threshold that causes reputational damage, there is no business incentive to solve this.

I agree. The way they make sending parcels internationally more difficult through custom declarations and taxes and fines for smaller occasions it’s more practical to send a gift card from the destination country.

An excellent blog. Their piece on credit card rewards programs is an excellent read as well.

Anti-money laundering.

People have been saying that for literal decades before Elon Musk said it.

Youtube is full of scam baiting videos – of people who waste scammer's time for entertainment.

A very usual scenario is that the scammer pretends to be a technician doing some remote support and for example pretends to provide some refund. Then they pretend that they've mistakenly sent out e.g. 10x the amount and they ask for the difference back, claiming that their job is on the line.

Crypto would work, but since they target old and tech-illiterate people, the easiest way is usually to ask the victim to go to a store, buy gift cards and read out the codes.

Google kitboga (a known scam baiter) for the videos.

Well on a similar topic, next step you could look at crypto’s and casinos. What are the biggest players doing there.

It is probably lazy in the sense that they would need more lawyers and more careful ToS. Defending their ability to shut anyone off completely is a lot easier than dealing with lawsuits from customers denied X, denied Y, denied Z in regions A,B,C..

Anti Money Laundering measures.

Gift cards are often used for money laundering or scams, because they allow to transfer monetary value in small increments and without tracking: there's no link between the person who bought a gift card (anonymously with cash) and a person who used its code to put money onto an account.

Money laundering, I think.

AML = Anti Money Laundering

What kinds of stacked cross-promotions like this exist, and even work out financially for everyone?

Which I find obnoxious - they're taxable benefits, so I'd really rather just have the cash.

Seems like restricting their purchase to companies would be an easy way to prevent fraud.

That's backwards. The company treats the GC as a liability. It cannot recognize the funds as revenue until they are spent. This is GAAP and law (but see exception below).

GCs are valuable to brands because they are marketing tools. Recipients are prompted to go to the merchant to spend money, and they usually spend about 40% more than the face value of the card.

Also, GCs are valuable to merchants for breakage. This is when a card (or partial balance) goes unused. Starbucks, as an imperfect example, recognizes about 10% of their total outstanding GC balance as revenue every year, due to breakage. This amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Well yes, obviously, and the company doesn't have to pay anything for the cost of locking you out of all your work files forever and costing you however much, so it's all upside for them.

If they had to reimburse you for the cost of all your lost files, then we'd see the real impact on finances.

It was a couple of years ago, it was virtual cards (I think one was a card given as reward by one of those legit review sites - edit: Gartner or one like those - which will reward you for providing reviews, and the other was money I had elsewhere that I converted to an Amazon card).

I remember I went through some automated process which asked me for some account details, and after a few hours (fewer than one day, I remember as much) my account was unlocked. It was scary!

What I remember puzzled me is that it was only two low-value cards. I would have understood the system being triggered by a lot of low value transactions, or a few large ones... but these were few and low value! Go figure.

Sorry I don't remember more details. All I know is it made me scared of gift cards.

I think you’re operating with the right mindset.

Looking at the linked story, the trigger seems to have come from redeeming a gift card bought at a major retailer.

Even if the purchaser uses a legitimate store, the user can’t really know the full supply-chain history of a prepaid code, and that uncertainty alone creates room for unexpected flags.

For people who already have a credit card, gift cards are a fuzzy choice if the goal is simply to load balance onto an account.

Something somewhere in the chain probably tripped a rule — maybe fraud-related, maybe a processing anomaly — and from the outside it’s impossible for the user to see which.