Comment by charcircuit
4 hours ago
If you buy stolen property without knowing you still get punished by having the stolen property taken away. Just because you don't know, it doesn't mean you have not done anything wrong.
4 hours ago
If you buy stolen property without knowing you still get punished by having the stolen property taken away. Just because you don't know, it doesn't mean you have not done anything wrong.
You will have your stolen property taken away, you won't have your entire house lock with bars and get evicted from the property.
Terrible analogy. The victim here bought the card from the retailer. Someone else had gained access to the secret contained on the card and stolen or attempted to steal the value on the card because Apple can't figure out how to sell a gift card securely.
Our victim was the victim of the only theft that involved the gift card. Then Apple stole the person's whole digital life with no recourse because they are ham-fisted and don't care.
Having your purchase taken away is not punishment. It's done because it's not actually yours, it still belongs to the person it was stolen from. It's a negative for the person who made the purchase, but that's just an unfortunate side effect. Unknowingly buying stolen property is not legally wrong. The typical law punishing receiving stolen property requires the receiver to know that it is stolen. Otherwise you're innocent of any wrongdoing, you just got ripped off.
If unknowingly using a stolen gift card just meant you lost your money, nobody would be complaining about Apple's behavior here. The issue is that they didn't just lose their money, they also got their account locked, which locks up a lot of stuff completely unrelated to gift cards.