One man’s Apple Account got locked after he bought a compromised gift card, losing him ’20 years of digital life’
www.techradar.com
A developer’s Apple Account got banned after they used a compromised gift card, locking away their digital life.

An Apple fan who has spent “nearly 30 years as a loyal customer” says they’ve been “permanently” locked out of their Apple Account due to what might be the overzealous actions of Apple’s automated anti-fraud system. It’s left them locked out of “20 years of digital life,” and it all started with the seemingly straightforward purchase of an Apple gift card.

  • MudMan@fedia.io
    0·
    16 days ago

    Not an “apple fan”, an apple-focuse software dev deeply embedded in their dev community.

    Which I suppose goes a long way to explain them being multiple terabytes in the hole inside Apple’s ecosystem, and also why even having a separate backup would definitely not fix their problem in the first place.

    • ByteOnBikes@discuss.onlineEnglish
      1·
      16 days ago

      I think the root issue is still real, regardless of how much koolaid this person drank.

      1. Person buys a gift card from a brick-and-mortar store
      2. Apple says its fraud
      3. Locks account and refuses to elaborate
    • reddig33@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      16 days ago

      Still doesn’t explain why he didn’t have local backups of his important data. If you’ve had computers that long, and are a developer — you should know better.

      • MudMan@fedia.io
        1·
        16 days ago

        He doesn’t say he doesn’t, so I assume he does.

        The problem is the way he got banned also blocks him from his shared auth, which in turn blocks him from purchases and device functionality:

        The Damage: I effectively have over $30,000 worth of previously-active “bricked" hardware. My iPhone, iPad, Watch, and Macs cannot sync, update, or function properly. I have lost access to thousands of dollars in purchased software and media. Apple representatives claim that only the “Media and Services” side of my account is blocked, but now my devices have signed me out of iMessage (and I can’t sign back in), and I can’t even sign out of the blocked iCloud account because… it’s barred from the sign-out API, as far as I can tell.

        Seriously, it’s like a one page blog. You could have read it in the time it took you to make me read it for you.