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 card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale)
From other comments explaining the kind of scams running at the moment, one possible scenario is that the card may have been taken, tampered with by a scammer (and the code recorded), and then placed back in the supermarket, with the scammer waiting until the OP purchased it and it was activated at the checkout.
Perhaps between the scammer redeeming it and the poster then trying to redeem by entering the same code, the scammer’s account was flagged and then the OP’s account terminated along with the scammer for using the same code (even though the OP had done nothing wrong).