Comment by jasode
2 months ago
>It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this.
It's also the buying of gift cards that can get Apple accounts locked: https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/r8b1lu/apple_will_pe...
If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people will learn to never buy/redeem Apple gift cards because of the real possibility of account bans.
- Don't give Apple gift cards to family and friends: You're potentially ruining the recipient's digital life if they redeem it.
- Don't buy Apple gift cards: You risk ruining your own digital life.
If you've been given an Apple gc for Christmas -- and you have paranoia of the risks -- don't buy anything online that's tied to your Apple ID. Instead, go to the physical Apple store to redeem it. And don't buy an iPhone with it because that will eventually get assigned to an Apple ID. Instead, get a non-AppleID item such as the $249 ISSEY MIYAKE knit sock.
I have thousands of credit-card reward points that could be traded in for Apple gift cards but I don't do it because Apple's over-aggressive fraud tracking means Apple's store currency is too dangerous to use.
The "gift card" in general is an anachronism whose time has passed. They have got to go. If companies are going to consider use of gift cards as red flags (as they often are, due to their being key components in money laundering and scams), then society should just abandon them. They are worse in every way than a prepaid credit cards, and in most cases where you want to give someone a gift card, you should probably just give them cash.
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.
It is a way to extract money from the unlucky unbanked people, like the immigrants making your lunch or cleaning the streets. A part of systematic oppression of the outgroup.
I used to buy a gift card every ~week at a local sandwich place near where I worked and ate at every day. Their deal was a free meal (sandwich, chips, drink) with a $50 gift card purchase. Then I'd just pay with the card until it ran out.
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There are people who don't own credit cards, and the app stores rarely offers any other "cash like" alternative other than gift cards.
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...
>they're not allowed to accept cash
my sweet summer child, neither rain nor sleet nor cash nor dark of night will stay your postal carrier from zer's appointed rounds, but winter is coming... do you want to still receive your mail?
> 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.
Giving cash also only really makes sense for kids or other asymmetrical relationships where one gives more than the other. If you are just passing cash around then you may as well have everyone not gift anything. If you want to show someone that you appreciate them then spend some time making something yourself or just spend time with that person.
Gift cards are worse in every case though unless they come with a heavy discount - and even then it's a pretty shitty gift.
It's company scrip for Boomers.
I'm the author of that Reddit post. I should probably update it to clarify that I didn’t just purchase the gift cards, but also redeemed them. I don’t think it was purchasing them that triggered the lock on my Apple account. I mean, after all, how would they know what my Apple account is until they’re redeemed?
>, 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.
Comments like this remind me of my distant relatives who proudly live out in the countryside and avoid traveling to big cities for any reason. They see a lot of Fox News headlines about bad things happening in big cities and they've concluded those bad things are happening all the time.
So they constantly congratulate themselves for not going to the nearest city, look down upon people who spend time in cities, warn us that we're at risk of the bad things happening, and never miss an opportunity to talk about how bad cities are in conversations.
Now replace big cities with big tech and that's exactly how a lot of these Hacker News comments read.
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Why even bother with apple at that point. There are so many better and/or cheaper Android phones out there
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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.
I always buy Apple gift cards when there's a deal on them. A few weeks ago you could buy an Apple gift card and get $10-15 of Amazon credit, so I bought the gift card and loaded it into my account.
I do this all the time and I've done it for years.
I once bought thousands of dollars of Apple gift cards, $500 at a time, by redeeming credit card reward points that could be spent like cash at a couple of select retail stores for 2X their points value.
It's a common practice. The edge cases are scary when you see them reported on Reddit, but they really are rare and generally get resolved after follow up (however inconvenient).
Some people go to extremes to do things like buy Apple gift cards at stores that give them a small discount on gas purchases or something. I'm not nearly extreme enough to do that entire process, though. Having the money loaded on to a Gift Card is inherently risky and I need some significant upside before I'll do it.
Lots of stores offer deals on gift cards, essentially giving g you a discount at the cards’ store. $100 Apple gift card for $80 means you can buy something at Apple for $20 off if it is less than $100.
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I buy gift cards often - if I know I’m going to spend money on Uber, why not give myself 25% off $100 before even any actual promotions are applied?
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I've bought and redeemed gift cards for only one single company ever. Can you guess what company? :) Exactly - Apple. Because these MFs generously banned whole countries from using their services, and not because of the justified sanctions or a law, but simply because they could. So when I lived in Ukraine and got my first Apple device, I had to buy and use gift cards to purchase any app or media in the Apple's closed system.
In Australia, we often have bonus offers on Apple Gift Cards, from the merchant/retailer.
This could include a "real" cash discount of ~8-10% (eg, buy a $100 card for $92), or loyalty points.
Our supermarkets often have a "20x" bonus points promotion, which is effectively 10% off a future shop - eg, buy a $100 Apple gift card, get $10 off a future shop in loyalty points. Buy $1000, get $100 off, etc.
Or, if you're a frequent flyer, earn Qantas points - buy a $2000 gift card, get 20,000 in QFF points - that on its own is some one way/return domestic flights, or halfway to Honolulu (one way), if you were going to spend $2000 on a new iPhone, Mac, iCloud etc anyway.
https://gcdb.com.au/gc/apple/ has been documenting all the recent offers for Australia.
If you want to trade in an old phone without doing it at the time you purchase a new one, the only way to receive the trade in value is via an Apple gift card.
I was looking forward to getting $160 gift card for my old iPhone 11 but after reading all this I think I’ll just leave it in a drawer.
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> If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people will learn to never buy/redeem Apple gift cards
You'd think so. Yet, the stories of PayPal locking up payouts to surprised people keep coming every year - and people still use them.
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.
They aren’t regulated as a bank in the US, where they have a much lighter-touch type of licensing.
Do the bank regulators in Europe typically help effectively when PayPal freezes an account?
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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.
It's the "would you eat from a jar of M&M's where one is cyanide? well what if there are X x 1000 M&M's?" principle.
It's easier to just eat something else, and not from the jar, than take an unnecessary risk, even if that risk is unlikely.
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I thought I'd buy Cory Doctrow's Enshittification ebook direct from his website. Surprised to be redirected to Paypal with no other option.
I remember when Cory would let you download any of his books for free and even said you were allowed to email him and call him a sucker for doing this.
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Doctorow has enshittified himself.
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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.
There are a good number of freelancers of various sorts that get paid via PayPal and only occasionally pull that money to their bank accounts to avoid the fixed fee, or even prefer to spend much of it straight from PayPal to avoid the percent fee. People also use it to send money between family members in different countries because it's often cheaper than an international wire.
It's quite easy to build up a few hundred or thousand USD worth. It feels just enough like a bank account that you think you're safe. Then...well, the internet is full of PayPal horror stories, I won't bore you with my own.
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That you don't keep a PayPal balance and i don't buy Apple gift cards is irrelevant to the people that do keep a PayPal balance and do use Apple gift cards
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For every purchase you make as a gateway there's a vendor account on the other end receiving that money and required to do accounting with it (like issuing refunds) which requires keeping a balance. These are the people having big problems when their account gets locked and their funds are no longer available. The blow back does potentially effect you if you return an item and then the vendor can't issue the refund because the account is locked.
It’s against money laundering. Onerous regulations being interpreted highly defensively create these kind outcomes.
Neither the people creating the legislations nor the people at Apple responsible for these flows care very much about collateral damage.
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?
Apple keeps money from the gift card after banning you. Just business, nothing personal.
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> If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people will learn to never buy/redeem Apple gift cards because of the real possibility of account bans.
If you are trying to be a bad person you could weaponize that approach. You do not like person x, send them some Apple gift cards... :o
> 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.
Maybe that hypothetical, bad person needs to find out what is triggering the account locking, first. Many small sums per gift card? A sum over a certain threshold? The point is, in reality it will not be up to pure chance.
However, I personally would not do that anyway.
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]
> I'm a Zionist
I don't like you too.
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It seems you haven't learned the whole lesson. You're close, though. If you're going to be skittish, there's a better and easier set of rules. Don't use anything that involves an Apple ID.
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.
No, it doesn’t require one… but you won’t be downloading anything from their App Store without one, leaving your only option for getting software onto it “Xcode after you build it yourself” since there’s no side loading. Xcode’s ability to do that may require an Apple ID or developer account; I’m unsure.
In the EU, the requirement to support alternative app stores would probably mostly fix that, but those of you in the US are kinda…
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I skimmed some of the comments from that giant Reddit thread. A lot of people responded that they’ve been buying even more Apple gift cards without problem.
One commonality among the stories in that thread from people who had problems was either switching their App Store country or using their App Store account primarily from a different country than the setting.
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.
An even better advice: Don't buy Apple.
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.
LOL it’s not some sisyphean task to not use big tech products, its slightly inconvenient and takes some time to adjust, don’t talk about it as though it were something that only the great men of the ancient times could do, take your iPhone and throw it as hard as you can against the concrete, you will be fine.
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But it is a solution. Apple being a poor stuard of their customers is indicative that people buying their hardware and software are not their priority. Apple support used to be stellar, they used to care about customers, they no longer do.
Apple's ToS should be readily indicative of anyone using any of their products that Apple's perspective is that you don't own anything and they can do whatever they want with anything you do with their products. As the author points out you clearly don't own free access to what you've purchased.
The last thing I'll say is that it is fantastic advice to not purchase Apple in 2025. You can only be certain that this won't happen if you avoid them. I actually own a MPB, with receipts from purchase, that I had to purchase a bypass for when the device was enrolled in MDM by a family member that Apple has MDM locked and refuses to remove from iCloud.
Avoid Apple, that's the best advice. If you can't avoid Apple, minimize your footprint and make sure you're a good boy or girl else Tim Cook will steal from you and hide behind some bullshit first line support tar pit and an army of lawyers if you do happen to decide to threaten them.
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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.
>> 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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1cem2jo/apple_u...
but evaluate your risk as you want.
The thing is, you don't need to avoid buying Apple completely, you just need to avoid giving Apple all of your life: your photos, documents, emails, backups, passwords, bills, ... basically you should avoid doing what the person in the OP did.
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So keep your crappy crap phone for a job and use a real computer for your personal life.
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BSD, Linux or TempleOS would never lock you out.
Nor provide much utility to the average person.
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"we sell gift cards :)"
"and we ban you for buying or redeeming them"
is just top tier comedy honestly.
As soon as I heard the first one of these stories about a guy getting google broad-spectrum banned because a junkbot AI thought his completely normal youtube comment was a nazi rant or whatever else it hallucinated - I bailed on the whole shebang. Hosting your own stuff is, if you're a reader of this site, easy enough and cheap enough there's little reason not to.
> such as the $249 ISSEY MIYAKE knit sock
I mean that is a problem in itself :D
Why does Apple sell giftcards?
Some cultures stigmatize gifting money, yet gifting corporate scrip is fine.
Then why do they ban accounts for using them? Is it some sort of honeypot?
For the similar reasons Apple sells socks.. maybe?
- Don't use Apple. Or Google.
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.
Someone has to be the stick in the mud, right? I personally enjoy being that guy that doesn’t have a smartphone and causing problems in every government office / institution that assumes everyone has a smartphone, it’s like I’m a pioneer on the frontier :)
E-stim addicts will rationalize their slavery to a small rock in their pocket and sing grand songs about how it’s a curse but they need it. Like all addicts, they are not capable of rationally assessing the utility of the dependence object, and they’ll start carting out all sorts of silly things and gesturing vaguely “See this washing machine? Yep, it needs the rock, that’s why I keep my rock on me and charged at all times”
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I think it's because they're usually not well-adjusted humans, they live in a fantasy (basement) world that is not realistic.
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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.
There's always a workaround. There are banks with far less annoying root checking and you can just switch. Many banks allow SMS or a physical authenticator for web banking or 3DS 2FA. There are also many was to bypass root detection. If your main problem is 3DS 2FA for online card payments, get a proxy card.
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You don't have to go to the bank for every transaction, you can just go there once to close out your account and open one somewhere that doesn't require that.
Depends though what you mean by "do not use Google". Having an Android phone with a Google account logged in will not affect you much. If they would block one account you just create another.
Having all your emails on Gmail and used for external services (bank, insurances, etc) is a different story though. I prefer to pay my email provider, at least they will care a bit more than they do for a free account...
I'm surprised, most banks I've come across force sms or phone-call 2fa only. A rare few allow generic TOTP authenticators, and maybe one or two has an app as an option. And I've only come across one bank that detects and warns for root access. Is there no "jailbreak hide" on ios?
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Or Microsoft.
Stay as far away from BigIT as you can. Linux or BSD are there for many good reasons. This is another one.
Other than Android, what viable Linux options exist for mobile devices?
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