alt Hacker NewsApple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
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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.
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.
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.
Here is how the gift card scam works (in Australia)
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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.
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From this discussion
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 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'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.
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..
Send this in an e-mail to [email protected]. 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.
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 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.
Last time I had this problem, I got it fixed after applying for and accepting a job at Apple.
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.
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?
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...
Exactly for this reason I bought a NAS where I can backup all my photos that are normally saved directly into iCloud.
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...
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?
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.
If Apple has the ability to do this, why don’t they just brick all devices in Russia?
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.
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?
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.
Take it to your state or territory tribunal ASAP. You might be able to take it to the courts and get temporary injunctive relief.
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.
Shouldn't these huge platform guys be mandated to offer data transfer-out service?
If this person with all his Apple-centric work cannot get personal support from Apple, well then perhaps no one does get it anyway.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
The emojis are so passive-aggressive it's actually crazy.
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.
Apple is no better than other Big Corps out there.
I would love to feel sorry, but seems you're technically capable of preventing this (unlike most people), just chose "convenience."
Well, this is the downside of "convenience."
If you manage to recover your account, I hope you stop preaching around how a company which doesn't give a shit about you is good and everyone should put all their eggs in their basket.
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.
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.
> 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
Just talk to a lawyer, have the lawyer send a letter, there is no need to bang head against CS for escalation
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.