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It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this. What's the rationale? It would make more sense if they just locked the person out of redeeming gift cards or something, not the entire account.

But reading horror stories like this is is why I only use the very bare minimum of any of these cloud services. Keep local copies of everything. For developer accounts, I always create them under a separate email so they're not tied to my personal. At least it can minimize the damage somewhat.

It sucks that I have to take all these extra precautions though. It's definitely made me develop a do not trust any big corp mindset.

This is one of the worst stories I’ve seen yet. It sounds like they were “all in” on Apple with zero backups, which shows some questionable judgment, but still, this sort of thing shouldn’t be possible any more than a bank deciding to take all your money with no recourse. (They can close your account, but they can’t keep your money.) Maybe hosts should be required to mail you a hard drive with your data on it when they close your account. Regardless, never assume cloud data is in safe hands.

To paraphrase an old saying: Live by Big Tech, die by Big Tech.

After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer

I've heard others say this (and was a "loyal advocate" of Windows for around 2 decades myself), but the reality is they simply do not care. You are merely a single user out of several billion.

Many of the reps I’ve spoken to have suggested strange things

That almost sounds like some sort of AI, not a human. But if I were in your situation I'd be inclined to print out that response as evidence, and then actually go there physically to see what happens.

The untapped answer is litigation. Call a lawyer and file against Apple. It may take several business days, and cost $$$$ but it will absolutely light a fire at Apple and get the attention of many-a-human. And if they ignore it, well, maybe a class action lawsuit awaits.

> I am not a casual user. I have literally written the book on Apple development (taking over the Learning Cocoa with Objective-C series, which Apple themselves used to write, for O’Reilly Media, and then 20+ books following that). I help run the longest-running Apple developer event not run by Apple themselves, /dev/world. I have effectively been an evangelist for this company’s technology for my entire professional life. We had an app on the App Store on Day 1 in every sense of the world.

I am surprised that with such a pedigree, the author doesn't already have contacts at Apple they could reach out to for that personal touch.

My 2 cents:

There was a time when I accidentally deleted some photos of which I had only one copy. I blamed myself for being stupid not having a copy but also money was tight for additional drives.

Then there is this: depending on a service provider and then blaming them for something like this. The problem is that now you are losing trust in service providers (of which there should be little to begin with) and on top of that you are also blaming yourself for depending on them. However you have to create a trust model where your fault allows you to have a service helping you with it while a fault at the service provider will allow you to restore data from your end too, getting the best of both worlds.

MacOS and Windows / Google with always logged in systems that lock you out completely at their will is an example of how your devices are not owned by you to begin with and then trusting them with your data as well means your digital life is basically owned by them completely.

Now imagine that there are no humans to solve this but endless LLM bots that respond with generic responses because the LLM has never seen a problem like this. I want to point out that owning your data and hardware is really important if you depend on it and your business especially does.

Here is how the gift card scam works (in Australia)

[Quote]

Yes they do still get activated at the checkout. But when you go to redeem, the code is missing the last digit or two so it doesn't work. People take the unactivated gift card, tamper with it to get inside carefully so it's not detectable, scratch and get the code, remove the last digit or two, replace the scratch off layer, put the unactivated gift card back on the shelf. Then after you activate the gift card at the checkout, they redeem it.

[/Quote]

From this discussion

https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/937339

Since your money is gone, I would file a complaint here:

ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission): The primary enforcer of gift card laws, ensuring businesses comply with the three-year minimum expiry, clear terms, and fair practices.

I back up regularly using Google Takeout and similar tools, but I don’t think it’s fair to shame this author . Even if you have backups , your recent and essential content and credentials will be locked out . 1% of your content is the most important

We all depend heavily on cloud storage and sso . Everything works fine until you are locked out .

And using them isn’t fully voluntary. They are necessary for collaboration . You end up using what your team uses .

You can try to be that “own cloud” snob but it only works if you live in a basement

Every normal person has content in Google , iCloud , OneDrive , Dropbox and maybe more. That’s 4+ single points of failure

You’re just not imaginative enough if you think you’re safe .

OPs only recourse is an insider or a lawyer

I'm not the biggest advocate of the EU DMA, but account and device access is one item we should actually be regulating very heavily, where potential penalties for (suspected) abuse or incompliance must be much more granular than full-on account bans.

It's hard to believe EU governments are actually considering mandating iOS and Android as gateways to access government services. It's a level of ignorance that's unfathomable.

This story is also exactly why I invest precious time running a Linux machine in the basement that rclones my cloud drives locally, as well as having full local copies of my webmail contents.

I don't get the mostly black/white "Self-host" vs. "Mega-Corp" discussions as there is a middle ground: smaller managed service providers (even: per-service).

You don't have to self-host everything in your basement, and you don't have to hand your entire digital life to Google or Apple either. Mail, CalDAV/CardDAV, Immich, Nextcloud, OpenCloud, OpenTalk, web hosting, Kubernetes, simple VMs.. whatever ... fully managed, run by local or independent providers or by the company behind projects, without Big Tech lock-in. If chosen wisely, you can migrate, take over, or bring it in-house when you want. Just spend a few bucks and do some company research. Same as you would when choosing craftsmen, lawyers or something else.

For example, that's actually how we operate as a company for some of our customers and even a few single persons: we provide SaaS AND setup documentation. Customers can transparently take over at any time. We even help separate domains, credentials, and administration from us. Convenience without captivity. I am sure there are hundreds of shops like ours, providing comparable services for people in their wider neighborhood.

I've shared your post with a friend at Apple.

In the past people have emailed Tim Cook directly - his email id is fairly easy to find.

Edit: "I have escalated this through my many friends in WWDR and SRE at Apple, with no success."

This doesn't bode well.

Wow. This is a cautionary tale. I don't think I'd be as devastated as this poor chap, but as it grew I realize I've allowed my iCloud photo library to become a single copy.

How are people handling this these days? If i wanted to ensure a full backup of everything on my iCloud to a NAS, what's the best way these days? Seems like they make it difficult by design..

I treat apple ID and google ID like throwaway accounts. I would never trust anything valuable to either. The problem is that it is very hard for "usual people" to do that.

I will also never have an electronic ID. We (Switzerland) were dumb enough to vote yes for it but we are giving away our freedoms eventually.

We need regulations to ensure vendor cannot lock in users and cannot threaten them. Everything should work like if you have your own domain and use email. If your provider go nuts, move your hosting and change your MX and point your local copy to it.

This should not be reserved to some nerd like me, it should be an universal right.

It is already late, but it can be reversed. We need for more sotires like this one to errupt, so people understand.

I've added a few updates on the original post, but there's no fix yet: https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

Feel free to chat to me on Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/hey.paris) or Mastodon (https://cloudisland.nz/@parisba) or email if you have ideas. I've received nearly 500 emails!

Send this in an e-mail to tcook@apple.com. He has a team that reads for stuff like this and can magically fix issues.

I've had to do it before, also for a gift-card-related problem (different from yours), and I was contacted by a member of the Apple executive escalations team a couple days later.

This just makes me extremely concerned for the iCloud transition I’ve been making. It shouldn’t be this easy to perform a user-disruptive action from the support/ops side. I would think they’d have visibility to some sort of “reputation” metric, given the age/purchase history etc even if anonymized.

I can understand this happening if it was a freshly created account topped up with a sus gift card but it’s unacceptable that the first action is to completely block an account with history.

Even more concerning is the nonchalant support response to “go create a new one” with emojis. C’mon Apple — this is just a terrible way to respond to this situation.

1. This is a total nightmare, the author has my deepest sympathy.

2. Last time there was a post where this happened to someone, I looked into what you can do if you're locked out of your Apple ID or Google Account.

I know people will say "just self host", but all of the self-hosting solutions are not friendly to families or non-tech people. Telling my extended family to tailscale into my server to look at family photos from vacation is a total non-starter. All of the self-hosted solutions are also just way less smooth to use than the built-in integration iCloud or Google Drive gives with devices.

That said, there are straightforward options to deal with this (at least the data part), if you plan ahead. The high level strategy is to setup backups that let you get _a copy_ of your data not tied to any login you don't control. It's a bummer to have to go through these hoops, but again pragmatically, I'm stuck using these services to participate in modern life.

For Google Drive, you can rclone your data to a computer of your choice to get a copy of your data not tied to Google Account. It will even convert G-Suite files to Microsoft Office format, so you have a copy of the data offline.

For Google Photos, I'm not aware of a great way to get the data - rclone only gets low quality copies of photos. I'm an Apple user, so I didn't dive too deep here, perhaps the HN hivemind knows.

For iCloud and Apple Photos, you have a lot of options. You can use Parachute backup or the PhotoSync App to get a copy of your data not tied to your Apple ID. If you have a mac, you can also setup your mac to download everything offline, and do time machine backups - they are not tied to your Apple ID.

I will also add Synology NASes have a super, super easy to setup way to do all of this stuff (HyperBackup plus Synology Photos app) that's borderline worth the cost of admission on it's own, even with Synology's recent turn to the dark side. If you have non-technical family, you should strongly consider pointing them in this direction, if you can use a smartphone you can probably get this working.

You may want to consider filling a small claims lawsuit against Apple for the maximum amount of damages your state permits in small claims.

It's not really about winning the claim. It's about getting them to acknowledge you and hopefully resolve it before the court case comes up. That is, you want them to "settle" by restoring your account.

IANAL and YMMV.

Last time I had this problem, I got it fixed after applying for and accepting a job at Apple.

This seems to happen quite often. Not just with Apple, but also with Google. In spite of this obviously insane behaviour, EU governments want to rely on Apple and Google for smartphone-based electronic government IDs.

If I were the person at Apple in charge of this kind of matter, I would ignore this case, just as I do for other regular people. Everyone should be equally not cared for by Apple. That's how Apple sucks in a way I can accept myself still using their product.

It sounds like the gift card # is included as part of a police investigation (as you already know scams often use gift cards as payment) - which would explain Apple's inability to help you or provide information (because they would be required by the state not to.)

You should approach a lawyer to petition Apple and the Tasmanian police on your behalf.

This happened to me really early on when my original Apple ID had an invalid format, as it was an ID made prior to the current version of Apple ID everyone uses, and Apple refused to port what I owned to the ID that I was forced to generate to sign into my newer device. My old ID had software no longer available in App Store, so this wasn’t just a matter of needing to repurchase apps- they were taking away my ability to use applications I bought from them. Since then, I’ve been incredibly wary of losing my Apple ID. I have a lot of respect for Apple, but I would bet that it’s easier to deal with ID related problems for someone with Q level clearance in the U.S. government or even a non-existent Men In Black ID problem than to resolve a problem with an Apple ID. They probably would tell the almighty to get a new ID.

> Support staff refused to tell me why the account was banned or provide specific details on the decision.

That‘s always the most kafkaesque part of these problems and should be illegal

Apple clearly has a problem. In recent months there have been a number of reports online of people getting locked out of their Apple ID/iCloud, the appeal getting denied, and Apple refusing to disclose why or reverse it. Generally those reports don’t relate to gift cards or developer accounts.

This is horrible and a big reason why I refuse to go “all in” on Apple, Google, or Microsoft (among other reasons). Apple is the one I’m closest to given my hardware, though.

Given how invested you are in the Apple ecosystem I can’t fathom why you would go get an Apple Gift Card from a store to do this kind of transaction, though. It wouldn’t even cross my mind to do it that way.

My son was just scammed out of $1000 using some gift card scam. Typically these gift cards cannot be revoked once issued and anyone using the gift cards (like the people who scammed my son) would be able to reap the rewards without any consequences. I’m hopeful that Apple has found a way to track fraudulent Apple Gift cards and are now locking people’s Apple ID who use them. I suspect there’s more to the story than is being shared. What’s the provenance of the original gift card? Could it have been obtained through some not 100% above board means?

The emojis in the support chat are insane.

Out of curiosity, why did you buy and redeem such a large gift card instead of paying directly? And was this a form of payment that was unusual in light of your account history?

Take it to your state or territory tribunal ASAP. You might be able to take it to the courts and get temporary injunctive relief.

My grandfather’s Apple account was blacklisted too but I was less sympathetic to him because he genuinely sends spam email from his personal account (it’s politically motivated).

One day he was bricked from his accounts because he ran afoul of Apple’s ToS. The problem then was I couldn’t feel sure that he hadn’t actually done something which a reasonable person would say should result in account closure.

Paris’s case is much more strange, because it feels more likely to be a false-positive.

There is no legal right to have an account with Apple or Google, and I’m not sure I want there to be. But so much of our lives are built on these services and these stories erode our trust that the services themselves can handle the responsibility of adjudicating acceptable use. We need our digital accounts to be robust in the very long-term, even when there are bad actors who want to do all manner of bad things. And we need to feel confident that a properly empowered human reviewed the case and can articulate the reasons for a ban. When we charge a person with a crime, we tell them what the crime was and give them due process to fight it. I’m not sure I want the courts to decide these questions but we need some more due process when it comes to account termination.

Same experience with Google. I was setting up SSO for a new web application and set off some AI flag on a sub domain for our company website. For 2 weeks every visitor saw a warning that out site was a phishing scam. Nightmare. With no recourse. No number to call. No person to talk to. No actual explanation of the error (I still don't know exactly what I got wrong). I just took it down, waited, and prayed.

Yikes it’s gotten here. Come on Apple!

Update 14 December 2025: Someone from Executive Relations at Apple says they’re looking into it. I hope this is true. They say they’ll call me back tomorrow, on 15 December 2025. In the mean time, it’s been covered by Daring Fireball, Apple Insider, Michael Tsai, and others, thanks folks! I’ve received 100s of emails of support, and will reply to you all in time, thank you. Finger’s crossed Apple calls back.

Second Update 14 December 2025: No luck so far, and not looking good. Anyone got a good lawyer to send them a letter and/or help me sue them? paris AT paris.id.au

Update 16 December 2025: The Register covered it. No luck yet.

Shouldn't these huge platform guys be mandated to offer data transfer-out service?

I imagine that every "should have known better" respondent on this thread has internalized their abuse.

Why in the world do we let tech companies adjudicate our service relations?

"After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer"

I know this might sound cynical... But the author should really understand that Apple gives less than zero fcks about them. Apple is known (and, weirdly, loved) for being tyrannical in this sense. Apple is known for their "my way or the highway" approach to anything, without much explanation and with self-attributed "we're always right" attitude.

> 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.

And that's why people complain about Apple's walled garden. Given the size of the damage I'd look into getting a lawyer involved, and possibly try and get Apple to court (in coerce them into being reasonable).

Frankly, I'm taking note of the archived page (https://archive.is/jrsLV) that I will reference to anybody that will ask why not to trust Apple in the future. Note that Google is also known for having a similar approach (there is no way to get support if something like this happens UNLESS you happen to know somebody inside google). Amazon on the other hand has made customer support one of its defining traits.

Btw if you are doing any decent amount of tech stuff, you should REALLY get off walled gardens and at the very least have an on-premise backup solution (an off-the-shelf nas with spinning disks could be a good starter solution).

Getting a special "notice me on social media (like HN)" fix won't actually fix the problem with using Apple's systems. It's just a temporary reprieve until some other aspect of their control of one's life breaks (by accident or indent).

Update posted at https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/:

    Update 18 December 2025: We’re back! A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed.

    It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me, and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way (sounds like classic gift card tampering), and my account was caught by that.

    Obviously it’s unacceptable that this can happen, and I’m still trying to get more information out of him, but at least things are now mostly working.

    Strangely, he did tell me to only ever buy gift cards from Apple themselves; I asked if that means Apple’s supply chain of Blackhawk Network, InComm, and other gift card vendors is insecure, and he was unwilling to comment.

This happened to me as well with a secondary iCloud account, and I still have no idea what triggered the ban. Apple support said they couldn't reverse it. The account was on an old iPhone, and after the ban, it became impossible to log out, rendering the device e-waste overnight. I at least didn't have any valuable data in icloud. But that experience prompted me to stop using Apple products or any other device that requires an online account to function. Fortunately, since recent AMD APUs are quite capable, I sold my MacBook M2 Max and have happily returned to using x86_64 Linux. No more Apple in my life, ever.

There is part of me that sort of wishes this would happen to me. I wonder if getting locked out of my cloud identities + bricking all my devices would actually be a great blessing in disguise from the Machine?

Off-topic and a stupid question: why does anything related to Apple attract so much attention on HN? As a newcomer, I assumed HN focused mostly on reverse engineering,retro computing, and deep technical topics.

This sucks Paris. What hope does the normal joe have to get a fair shake if you can't even get this resolved? The layers of click through contracts, opaque terms, LLM customer service, un-empowered customer service, and arbitration agreements make this a crazy relationship we get into with big tech. If we have a problem like this, we should be able to talk to a person at the company that can resolve this right without threatening a lawsuit. It's nuts.

I'm curious about the apple's passwords app. Where you able to use it? What about passkeys?

While I can't help with extricating your data from the fruit factory's claws I do have a suggestion what to do next: get a 10-foot or 3 m pole and use it to distance yourself from them in the future. Self-host your data if possible, find a friend you trust who already self-hosts and see if you can hitch a ride, use some commercial service if necessary but don't allow yourself to get trapped within an 'ecosystem' again. If a company makes it extra hard to use things outside of their own control you should understand that they're not doing this for their users but to remain in control and maximise their chances of extracting as much from their captives as possible.

Don´t check in to Hotel Cupertino or soon you'll be singing along:

   Mirrors on the ceiling
   The pink champagne on ice, and she said
   "We are all just prisoners here
   Of our own device"
   And in the master's chambers
   They gathered for the feast
   They stab it with their steely knives
   But they just can't kill the beast

   Last thing I remember, I was
   Running for the door
   I had to find the passage back
   To the place I was before
   "Relax," said the night man
   "We are programmed to receive
   You can check out any time you like
   But you can never leave"

I upvoted this for visibility but if you put your entire digital life in the hands of any of these tech companies and store all your shit in the cloud with no local backups, you are at least as blameworthy as they are. I’m less surprised that Apple would do this than I am that somebody who is clearly tech savvy could be this stupid about tech.

If this person with all his Apple-centric work cannot get personal support from Apple, well then perhaps no one does get it anyway.

This kind of thing happens more often than people think. You trade convenience for blind trust and sometimes that trust gets revoked without warning. Whether it's Apple, Google or whoever’s "ecosystem" you live in if you don’t own your keys and data, you’re just a tenant who forgot the landlord doesn’t take calls.

Big tech giants locking unsuspecting users out of their digital lives is nothing new. What would it take for our society to stop relying on these closed, walled gardens for critical stuff?

How many account lockouts must occur before we accept that digital life built on permission rather than ownership is inherently fragile?

if you pay for service you should receive some guarantees it is your money, it is crazy that there is no cool-off period where you get banned like this even by mistake or by Apple deciding they do not want to offer a service anymore and allow you to take out your stuff before fully shutting down.

This is the same guy who had $60,000 permanently locked in his Wise account 6 months ago, that is quite a run of bad luck. https://cloudisland.nz/@parisba/114504600921948939

My condolences. I don't have any advice, but you may be able to learn something from my very similar experience.

https://skogsbrus.xyz/dont-put-all-your-apples-in-one-basket...

Remember, companies get away with these over the top behaviours cause it costs them nothing to have one less customer.

If this situation somehow escalates until they have to take action, they will already have made so much money that is not a blip.

They don’t care. You as an individual customer means absolutely nothing.

While I understand the attraction of doing so, I’m not sure I like the implication in the post that the reason this needs to be reviewed is because of how loyal of a customer this person is, or the fact that they have written books on developing for Apple devices.

I hope you get it back. I always had the mindset that if I am a paying customer that this type of situation is very unlikely. But you are literally a massive paying customer and you got hit. The truth is you are just a nobody even as a customer who has dumped thousands of dollars as a loyal supporter. Showing up on HackerNews is a positive thing as the only way to get any traction in these situations is either be famous and complain or your story going viral and someone with power seeing your plea. I worried about only having a physical copy of my family photos so started paying apple for some storage. This type of event worries me. Good reminder to have multiple backup solutions.

"Many of the reps I’ve spoken to have suggested strange things, one of the strangest was telling me that I could physically go to Apple’s Australian HQ at Level 3, 20 Martin Place, Sydney, and plead my case."

This does not seem strange to me and could be a course of action. When I moved my domains off Google because of this type of "banned without recourse" possibility, I found a registrar that had a physical address, small office, and people listed on the company website (porkbun) so in the worse case I could fly to the office and straighten things out.

No mention of even going to an Apple store. Maybe the nearest one is very far away from him?

I wish people would understand how common this is. There's no customer service line you can call when some overseas moderation farm worker spends 0.8 seconds looking at something and taps the hotkey for one of the reasons in their terms of service that they deem an account should be permanently wiped for. Have some recourse. Buy a NAS that will do automatic backups of all your cloud accounts. Long ago I lost a decade of Gmail and GDrive because I posted a PNG file of a credit‑card form that said "This post only viewable with Google+ Gold." You need to be treating these accounts as ephemeral.

I had this happen to me once while traveling, and then by random chance I ran into a former Apple Store employee at a hostel.

She told me to email Tim Cook directly (his email is entirely guessable).

I did this and within a day or two my access was restored.

It's one thing to lock someone's account so they can't make payments or whatever. It's another altogether to lock them out of accessing their own documents / photos / etc. That's just 100% unacceptable regardless of what triggered it. And even if they did have a valid reason to lock your account, at the very least it should be, "you have 7 days to download / clear out your documents".

Absolutely horrible black mark on Apple.

I'll be buying an external HDD to download all my photos / iCloud docs to. I've been too trusting.

There really should be a law around being able to access and review locked accounts. I've seen so many cases of people just losing their digital lives because of an automated system.

My partner was locked out by Apple last year during a password/device change gone awry. Two weeks and we finally got through to someone competent who fixed it. At one point it looked as though we would lose many of the videos of our son growing up.

Since then I have been removing myself from the ecosystem - my email is from hey, file sync on Dropbox, obsidian for notes, whatsapp for messages. Sometimes it doesn’t feel as joined up, mostly it is way better.

Moved to framework computers + omarchy last month and am not looking back.

Dustin Curtis wrote about a similar incident at https://dcurt.is/apple-card-can-disable-your-icloud-account

Slightly different issue involving the Apple credit card, but it’s just as insane that there’s no separation between the different parts of Apple.

For that reason I will never have an Apple Card, and I guess I won’t be redeeming Apple gift cards with my Apple ID.

Yup. They did the same thing to me a few years back. Not sure why. Had to re-apply as a developer with a different email address. I don't use Apple products anymore.

This kind of Kafkaesque behaviour is what I've come to expect from any kind of online services. It's also why I won't use anything that cannot be setup offline.

This is why I self host my blog. My email. This is why i try to stay away from the convenience of big tech. It is not the first time this happens and it will not be the last.

This is really sad that some people are in ways blaming it on the author. While I do advocate zero to almost zero usage of services by these OEMs or big corps, in today's world everything, or almost everything, is linked to your email and/or phone number and in turn with a computing device, which, for me, makes these OEMs essentially public service providers for a cost. Locking a user out literally casts that person out of today's society — communication, dating, groceries, transport, hell, in some cases maybe even health care and emergency services — you name it. So it's very ingenuous and unkind of us not to raise hell and shout for extreme accountability on these corps' part instead of reminding a victim of T&C and not having diversified the online services usage enough across providers.

Any company or entity ought not to be allowed to wield power over our lives, like locking someone out arbitrarily, let alone via some asinine, half-baked algorithm.

I think apple is a red herring here, it's the amount of legal power granted to the enforcement of money laundering laws and the lack of ability to push back against this

Musk/Jobs archetypes, though unpalatable at a personal level, are valuable in their willingness to burn themselves up to fight the "system" vs bureaucratic types who just fall in line and elevate what is a political issue into a Sacred Value

Well, you keep literally selling your own life to one immense American corporation and that's how you are treated.

Time to say bye to Apple and Google for good...

Does anyone know if in the USA you could simply use small claims court on every individual device and service to get likely default judgements against Apple and then when they are unlikely to pay up, get a judgement against Apple and make a big deal about strolling into a store or even HQ to take Cook’s own devices out of his office or maybe just seize his corporate jet and auction it off?

I just want to point that buying gift cards in order to participate in gift-card arbitrage violates both apple rules and payment provider rules.

If you are buying large amounts of gift cards and then redeeming them, it is critical that your purchasing patterns do not look suspicious, such as buying more things that a normal user might need: multiple iphone wallets, multiple iPhones, or similar items.

That's probably why people should not live in the gated garden. Once they made a mistake, you will feel alien in the free world outside.

I hope OP can get his account unlocked. This is a good reminder for everyone else, backup your cloud data to a local drive. But thats just one part, the social / email OAUTH side of things, phone accounts etc..., terrible situation. It should be easy enough to walk in a HQ / office and show credible ID and get your account unlocked.

This should be illegal. What about normal people affected like this. He at least still stands a chance given his position.

Wen thinking about risks from depending on the cloud, people fixate on the risk of losing data, when this kind of denial of access is a much more likely occurrence.

I've started on my de-appleification plan in earnest this year:

https://blog.majid.info/quit-apple/

If local backups were not so hard... It is sometimes impossible to back up an iPhone to a computer; yet seamless to backup to iCloud... Infer what you will. I am skeptical of over reliance and dependance on Apple more than ever. Unfortunately, interoperability is something we can wish for rather than expect.

Only depend on platforms as redundancy. Never as primary source.

Break that discipline and you are exposing yourself to this danger.

I deeply sympathise with the author.

Nevertheless, the irony of this is overwhelming: a guy who spent his life promoting a company whose model is "we deeply control the products you use" gets burned by the fact they deeply control the products he's been using.

I do have an Apple ID, which was banned due to fraud and customer support couldn’t do anything about.

The thing is, that account was just used for dev. things for the US company, which builds/sells software for the US federal government (among the other US entities).

It would not be very wise to do fraud.

I used to have an eBay account, and at some point, despite not having used it for a year or so, I got an email saying I was permanently banned from eBay.

No appeal, no reasons given, no possible way to create another account.

Just. Banned.

The companies need to be big enough to provide the amazing services they do, but once they are large enough they will never care about individuals.

My internal model of large companies is that they are intelligent, psychopathic aliens. The people in them are like cells in our body, important for the function, but with no agency, and they are not who you are dealing with.

You're dealing with the company, and it's an inhuman, psychopathic alien.

Richard Stallman warned us about this.

I don't feel sorry for a person that heard all these stories before and didn't say a word, and continued to promoted Apple crap.

"I have contacts in Apple, I'm better than all those losers". Well you were, until you were not.

Maybe events like this will be a wake up call to our community. Virtually everyone around me uses Apple everything - colleagues, friends, family. And they find it weird when I say I don't use Apple out of principle and I even have to justify it.

This is one reason I moved to a cloud photos provider (Ente) with an automated continuous export feature so that everything can go to my NAS.

Also because I know big tech has no real customer support.

It’s no comfort to OP though and I feel very sorry for them.

As you are in Australia you might get somewhere if you lodge a complaint with Consumer Affairs

https://www.accc.gov.au/

And there are also separate bodies for each state.

If Apple has the ability to do this, why don’t they just brick all devices in Russia?

Congrats, you did this to yourself by willingly using proprietary software you have no control over and now you cry that you have no control. You did this to yourself.

I went back to an MacBook pro M5, after being away from Apple for a year or 5 (Lenovo etc). I tried to re-enable my apple account but I had to wait 5(!) days to change the password. I ended up making another account.

What I've learned from all these disaster stories: have backups for everythig. I have an iCloud+ subscription but also a OneDrive subscription, photos are sync'ed to both storages. On gmail, I set up fwd for all emails to another email address (non-Google related) just in case. Of course you can't do this for every service but do it for the ones you can.

On a meta note, Fuck Apple, I'm so glad I didn't pursue an iOS developer career 10 years ago.

I have had an apple id problem myself, for the past N years. Mine is an old mac.com account, which has my Gmail address as the backup email (and the primary one now that mac.com isn't doing email anymore). Because of this, I cannot sign up for a new account with my Gmail (it is tied to the older mac.com account).

I've managed to reset the password, but I must answer a security question to log in. I mean, I answered those security questions probably a decade ago and I do not know what they are anymore. You can reset your security questions, but to do that you need to use an iPhone (last one I owned was a 4) that is still logged in, or, answer a security question. Which is as we established, the problem.

So every couple of months I log in, try a few other possible answers, get them wrong, and get locked out for a bit.

Anyway, I need to get this fixed my march, due to apple being the formula one streamer in my country now, so I have to actually solve the problem of logging in to my apple account. Or, I guess, making another random email just so I can watch f1. Sigh.

But if anyone knows how to reset security questions, I'd love to know. I would way rather pay apple actual money than go back to torrenting the races.

Just curious if the account owner is still able to access their passkeys stored on their Apple device at the moment.

Not too keen on passkeys without an easy way to backup.

Same goes with sign in with Google and Apple.

His problem is fixed today; the gift card was already redeemed. Apple turned his Apple account back on.

As someone using Linux to build web applications, I wonder what about the Apple ecosystem could make it worth to have such a Damocles’ sword hanging over me my whole life.

Am I missing something? My current perspective is that not only am I free of all the hassle that comes with building for a closed ecosystem, such as managing a developer account and using proprietary tools, it also comes with much harder distribution. I can put up a website with no wait time and everybody on planet earth can use it right away. So much nicer than having to go through all the hoops and limitations of an app store.

Honest question: Am I missing something? What would I get in return if I invested all the work to build for iOS or Mac?

This sucks, I hope you can somehow reach Apple and get them to unfuck your account.

My own experience with big tech account bans was much milder, so I learned my lesson without much pain. I got a "free Azure credit to learn cloud computing" email from MS, redeemed the credit, created a VM, started clicking around the settings and got locked out. Raised a support ticket, asked what I did wrong, told my account was flagged for suspicious activity. I asked what I did wrong again and got a reply that my case had been reviewed by a human and that my Azure account wouldn't be reactivated. Thankfully, my primary MS account didn't get banned for that.

Conclusion #1: it's frankly insane that a big tech company can fully terminate your account with no means of recourse. People like to mock the EU and its lawfare, but I think it is the best candidate to force the tech firms to implement some sort of firewall between their various services, so they can't terminate your access without prior notice or without compensation.

Conclusion #2: those who are reading this, don't put all your eggs into one basket and teach your friends and relatives to do so as well. That is, if you have to use the services of various big tech companies, spread them around. Have a boring account with one company that you use for free stuff, a boring account with another company that you use for paid services (if you can purchase services X and Y from two different companies, do so), a boring account with a third company that you use for getting paid, a fourth account that you use for shitposting and getting into arguments with internet strangers.

There have been so many cases of Apple, Google, etc. doing this that it's hard to have any sympathy for them at this point. If it was some grandma who didn't know better that would be another story, but the author was surely aware

  - that Apple *can* always *just* disable their account
  - that Apple regularly *does* do that
  - that Apple does not care about them at all

and they chose to bet their entire digital life on Apple's benevolence anyway. They lost that bet.

We need more stories like this hitting the mainstream news until even a non-technical person's reaction to this is "well, what did you expect?"

Probably worth reading Doctorow's "Scroogled": https://craphound.com/scroogled.html

Centralization of power in unaccountable organizations has always been a recipe for disaster.

I could suggest some slogans:

"Apple. Not even once."

"Friends don't let friends use Apple."

But I think this is a problem that merits more than slogans.

This is a good post and I wish all the best to the author that someone from Apple can help resolve this. I will personally never use iCloud ever again because of this.

They'll probably reverse this soon, but it's an eye-opener for people who store their entire existence on 3rd party clouds. Nextcloud is your friend.

Could you do something like self hosting a MDM (say Fleet?) so you can kick the tainted Apple ID off your devices and get them back if this happens?

These kinds of cases just triggers all the rage for me, be they true or not and whatever is the actual case.

I have fresh experience of setting up Azure/M365 and AppleDev for my startup. Those things are scary as f*uck, in many perspectives:

(1) Dark patterns everywhere (click this checkbox and we'll buy you a license, oops +xxxxx €/$ per year just came; get one-month trial for O365 to get bizaccount, select 1 license, see that there is 25 licenses (~ 4k €/$) to be renewed if I don't cancel).

(2) Microtransactions everywhere (e.g. Azure VM SSD I/O: every read/write operations costs), DDOS and 10/100 k€ bill coming. Everything "scales", especially bills. And no billing caps, of course.

(3) Codesign with Microsoft: I have option to wait weeks for freight ship to ship USB cert token (if it ever survives past toll/postal service after that), or use AzureKeyVault, but that is officially only for companies that has taxes/accounting for 3 years of operation. So no startup can use that by this requirement to codesign?!

(4) AppleDev (and kind of Azure/MS too) requires DUNS number, which takes 6 weeks to get in normal case. Apple's 5 bizday route doesn't exist anymore (at least not for non-US-based companies). Or just use D&B magic link from Grok and get it immediately in 5 mins.

(5) If you base your business on Azure/M365 and AppleDev and be obidient and compliant (as I am doing/being, because I'm building real legit and long-term company, not some hussle project), it still doesn't matter, because they can just can decide by human/ML to shut your business operations and means of living. And getting answers like in the title's article's screenshots with those emojis are just the most non-human interaction that there can be done for affecting so devastatingly to someone's life/business.

These are the most disgusting things that I know of.

I hope he learns, does backups and switches to hardware without walled garden baked in, without the company being the real owner of your belongings.

Disabling iCloud seems like a gift. I wish I could just get rid of it all without any subsequent nagging every time I update/upgrade macOS.

I always knew Google and Facebook did this (let's make Oculus a Facebook requirement! oops now you're banned - genius, brilliant, all the people working there have an IQ of 600) but now the trifecta is complete

Seriously can we fucking have any products that work, in the 21st century

Or is the answer just "lol automation is cheaper"

Seems like we need to popularise proper guides on how to convert our iCloud storage using self-hosted solutions. It's a shame though.

Apple is no better than other Big Corps out there.

Has it been 12 months again already? That's about how often one of these stories come up. I guess some people don't learn.

If Apple doesn't have the sense to reply to this in a sensible manner then that company is in far worse shape than I thought.

I also got locked out of my Apple ID several years ago. I have the password but still can’t access it. I had to make a new one

Exactly for this reason I bought a NAS where I can backup all my photos that are normally saved directly into iCloud.

Given how Apple Music has completely fucked up my wife’s music collection, I can’t imagine them being able to unfuck your situation at all. So sorry.

Most cases we see here do only lock the media side of accounts. It’s concerning this blocked the entire account.

> It holds terabytes of family photos

Why do people still do this, why??!? This is not an ignorant user! The author (and victim) has written several books about Apple tech, how do they not know that these "platforms" cannot be trusted with anything -- especially data that isn't backed up somewhere else!

Companies don't care about people, and the bigger they are the more evil they behave. They need to be treated like hostile business partners because that's what they are. They're only after money and absolutely nothing else.

This is not some radical leftist manifesto, it's the plain reality. And it's not new either. It's always been like this.

The modern trend of useless error messages, in cloud and no good way to talk to a human is really insidious

Just talk to a lawyer, have the lawyer send a letter, there is no need to bang head against CS for escalation

parisidau, I hope you get your account back.

you can in the meantime, and for the future, try compartmentalizing services you use. the old saying of "all eggs in one basket" applies here as well.

VPS, hard drives, etc. are cheap and keep you more in control of your own data than you're with big tech.

A while ago we fixed people by killing them. I see the same pattern with account banning.

I probably shouldn't be surprised, but… so, you are saying, Apple can remotely brick YOUR device? For any reason, let alone "because of a mistake"? Heh, and I was considering to buy my first iPhone. I mean, seriously, I can only shrug at the fact that anybody accepts these terms at all.

One lesson I'm taking away from this is never to buy or use Apple gift cards

Sue them. If you don't sue them, they’ll just keep doing it.

I never understand why people put all their important stuff in one company.

[flagged]

Has OP tried emailing Tim Cook directly and pleading his case?

This type of stuff makes me want to buy gold and guns.

Sounds like something triggered a suspicious activity report. Not sure if it also applies to the likes of Apple but they’re forbidden from revealing any information about what caused it, etc with the customer or anyone.

Pretty infuriating to see those chatbot responses. (The emoji -- and the particular choice of emoji -- were a very clear tell.)

Perhaps the most annoying thing about this, certainly after getting traction on HN, is that his account will be reinstated....

...and then nothing. No sorry, no "here's what went wrong", no blog post to address the angry masses, no recognition, reconciliation, or reformation. Just things working again and silence.

About 11 months ago, this happened to my Apple account that I’ve used for over two decades, with purchases worth probably tens of thousands.

Apple Support told me these “decisions are taken in a higher department” and escalated me to tier 2, who insisted: “we’ve determined your account doesn’t meet the conditions to enable it.” Their suggestion was for me to create a new Apple account.

Then, three days later, my account was suddenly re-enabled; and it has worked perfectly ever since, as if nothing happened.

I hadn’t used gift cards in nearly a decade, so my guess (and this is pure speculation) is there must be other flags affecting older accounts.

The whole episode was utterly kafkaesque, and it’s made me much more cautious about relying too heavily on the whims of our private megacorp gatekeepers.

Companies like apple should be liable to pay many millions in damages for this kind of shit. The people should make it hurt so much for them that they think twice before doing it without having a clear and working appeal process where you are clearly explained what happened and guided through it.

You do not own your apple account, and you never did. I would take this as a chance to learn about digital sovereignty and self hosting where you control your own data so this never happens again.

Google and Apple can and will delete your content at any time for any reason and there is no appeals court.

The OP is Australian and I've been recently reading of this scam that they may have fell victim of: https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/937339

The real, foundational problem here is that we have abandoned the principles that made the internet. We don't care about open protocols, we accept walled gardens. Every day those walls get a little higher until eventually someone wins and the only thing that exists is the garden.

I don't know what the solution is, but I think part of it is deliberately divorcing yourself from the big players as much as you can, which isn't much for some people, and encouraging government efforts to break them up and pull down garden walls whenever the opportunity arises.

This is what government is for even if we've forgotten it in some places.

True nightmare :( hope to get resolved

This person has read literally dozens of stories just like theirs and just shrugged and said "couldn't be me".

Well, it can always be you.

A painful reminder that Apple's service is subject to terms.

Incidentally, the guy's .paris domain name may be next unless you are a resident or have a business related to the region of of Ile-de-France

Nightmare.

The stories of online-only service failures are legion. And yet if you can get face to face support, even one person can do so much. The gap is infuriating.

I didn’t notice, do you have a Brick and Mortar Apple Store you can visit? I can’t help thinking this as I read the post.

Of course this is not a physical hardware issue. Where a store employee could just hand you, say, a new phone. This is on the level of getting a slot on Tim Cook’s day planner, though I imagine the person with the ability to fix this is an underling many levels down Cook on the org chart.

As of data (photos, contacts, files etc.), you should have rights to request all that for download. GDPR etc that grants you that.

Email Tim Cook (serious)

This is disgusting and unconscionable conduct by Apple. Your whole life is locked into your account (digital data and physical devices), and they either don't care or don't have the processes in place to fix it.

This is the kind of thing they need to be sued on a massive scale for to solve but it's too rare and too expensive for anything to ever happen to them for it.

That emoji in the last pic felt like passive aggressiveness. I don’t have anything to say but it’s why I never put my eggs in one basket, and essential stuff are always backed up, but if your job is developing in an apple eco system and this scenario happens, it’s basically like getting fired and banned from working ever again!

No idea if this has ever been tried, but a GDPR "subject access request" requires a company to hand over all the data they hold on you, which technically should include all your photos, media, messages and everything.

Come on Apple do the right thing here. Surely there are some people from Apple reading this in the comments

These online storage services like iCloud and Google Drive are, and always have been, a trap.

They feel convenient, but they will keep changing their TOS to disadvantage you further and further as time goes on.

Everything you upload is scanned into their AI to create a profile about you that they can then exploit (once again, to your disadvantage). They do it despite regulations against it (Who's to say what they're complying with, deep in their complex data centers? Who's gonna even check? And how?) This is why online services that take control of your data are such gold mines (subscription fees, analytics, profiling, etc). They get you coming and going.

And of course, the account terminations: The earthquakes and "natural disasters" of the online world that destroy lives with no consequence or care.

When your data is not in your sole possession, you own nothing.

How utterly indifferent one needs to be to have no "VIP" support line for cases like this.

On the other hand, great learning case on putting eggs in one basket and on "own nothing and be happy".

This really sucks, I hope Apple sorts it out, I wonder what one can do to put pressure on Apple - I suspect you may need a lawyer to write them in order to get your issue escalated.

I don't like that people just shrug and say this is how all big tech is.

Apple charges a premium and built their brand name on customer service.

But they have stopped caring about the customer.

I was also a loyal Apple customer for 2 decades and used to recommend them to everyone.

Now I recommend them to no one.

I've switched my phone back to android a few years ago to avoid apple lock-in. I still use an ipad pro and several macs and peripherals, sets of airpods and apple tv and what not - then I wanted to buy the watch - and was told it cannot work with any of their tablets or computer and cannot be activated without an apple phone. OK apple.

One day my debit card expired while on long overseas travel, suddenly I was unable to install apps I already paid for on my mac and other devices, update any apps, or install free apps, I could not pay with a different card because those were in a different region and would have required a region switch locking me out of a lot of content and apps. So for several months I could not install many of my apps I bought on my other sevice or update or install free apps. OK Apple.

I also remember how the base config of Apple laptops were 8gb ram and 256gb SSD when all other decent ones were on 16 and 2tb - and remember apple is supposed to be a premium brand and they're supposed to not burn you with a default config. OK apple. Then they charge you 3 times more for the upgrade from 256gb ssd to 2tb than what 2tb costs retail. OK Apple.

I still love their tablets and laptops and even the mac mini. But I've already started to mentally prepare for a switch to Linux and maybe x86 or other hardware.

Apple cannot be trusted. They are a fashion company and not a tech company any more. Jobs is dead.

Plan your exit, reduce your exposure, soon they will be so evil and dysfunctional that you will regret it.

Don't trust them with your most valuable data. Use other services. Use a diverse mix of providers, no apple exclusivity. If you tie your entire life to one cloud, especially Apple, you have set yourself up for future ruin.

Their software quality and reliability is also slowly slipping. Everything is being dumbed down. Their business processes are becoming a broken maze. Apple used to be a company that aimed to satisfy simultaneously the power user and the basic user, now they only care about optimising for the casual user mass market, power user is going to have an increasingly tough time with them. Remember it is now a fashion company, watch their keynotes and believe the vapid image they project.

I've been locked from my apple id for two *months*.

Even though I:

- had my recovery password

- re-confirmed the email

- re-confirmed my phone

They just kept telling me "we'll contact you in two weeks", and kept not following.

Then after the 4th recovery they sent me my recovery link on email (in any case weeks later).

Worst of all? Their privacy and security they keep repeating like propaganda are beyond bogus. Sure, they de-logged me from all of my accounts, that I appreciate, but I had 0 issues accessing all of the contents on my hard drive if I was a thief with a simple script in recovery mode I could still access everything. Where's the security? Propaganda only non-technical normies believe and then repeat.

I'm never ever buying Apple products ever in my life, I've got MBPs that my clients send me, but that's it.

Being a "loyal customer" to any giant corp is just making it extra convenient for them when they fuck you.. You need your stuff as files on a computer you actually control.

A painful reminder that Apple's service is subject to terms.

Speaking of which, the guy's .paris domain name may be next unless he is a resident of Ile-de-France etc.......

A good reminded to myself to do another GDPR request and download all my iCloud images to an external hard drive

I’d expect this crap from Google, but not Apple.

If this doesn’t get fixed, I’m going to have to rethink a lot of my digital life, including my company’s.

hopefully he’ll get resolution by bringing his case to the “media”. Still, for someone who heavily presents the argument that he’s a professional writer and even says “I am asking for a human at Apple to review this case.” , I find it odd that he tries to make his case via an obviously ai-written post.

I mean, isn't writing what you said you do for a living?

Now that this is on the Hacker News front page, surely Apple will be escalating this and provide a general solution, no?

The emojis are so passive-aggressive it's actually crazy.

google locked my sister's account for some reason and we spent months trying to get it unlocked. no luck. fuckers.

“I never thought leopards would eat my face,”

It's hard to empathize with a technically-inclined person who uses cloud services for life-critical things.

Let's just hope more people read the story.

If Apple engineers read this: I can't sign in into my iCloud account from my android phone, it just doesn't work, meaning I can't manage my subscription like HBO now that I switched to an android phone.

PS: My plan is to wait for Apple to release a folding iPhone to move back!