Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

Just realize this: the longer you play this game, the higher your odds of getting banned. Once it hit me, I quickly decoupled from Google. It's like playing satoshi roulette for 0.5% gains. You keep winning until you get fully wiped.

Doing everything and/or all-at-once is not practical, but having backups for most critical infrastructure helps a lot, and when it's rolling, it rolls without effort.

One can go step by step and call it's done when it becomes too much to bear or satisfactorily decoupled.

That said, keeping a backup of everything, decoupled from any account I don’t control, gives me huge peace of mind.

This used to be true, but isn’t for SSNs assigned since I think 2011 - the exact year could be wrong, that’s from memory. Since that switch, the component that used to be geographical is assigned randomly.

I'm not following. If things have gotten this far, the victim has already been duped into buying the card and intends to send it to the scammers anyway... ?

But also, how could the card possibly work that way? What are the other digits even for; and wouldn't they quickly run out of valid "last few digit" combinations for issued cards?

Not store their data in their iPhones. Period. I only store temporary data and photos I wouldn't care about.

Apple isn't. Just sayin'. They are trying to do it, but they aren't really anywhere near the scale of Google and Facebook. They make money (lots on money) by selling high-margin hardware.

Currently, Apple is genuinely serious about preserving user privacy. I realize that can change, in the future, but it's the way it is, now. I get the feeling that a lot of folks on HN are having difficulty understanding businesses that make a profit by doing stuff other than harvesting and selling PiD, but that's not what has made Apple a 4 trillion-dollar company. They make that money the old-fashioned way; but with a modern twist.

I just don't get why these companies should be in the business of offering gift cards-- at least, not if they can't be redeemed safely.

I'm sure people would run other kinds of scams with AppleIDs without the existence of gift cards, but gift card redemption scams have gotta be 99% of the reason people create fake accounts. The support burden would evaporate almost overnight if they just exited this stupid market.

You can contact an employee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation

I'd say also that you should never purchase Apple gift cards from anyone except Apple directly, but if the card itself was tampered with (stolen, opened, scraped and code retrieved, re-covered with generically available scratch-off material, re-sealed, returned to the display) there's nothing keeping that from happening in Apple stores as well.

There is a technical measure that gift card providers could put in place to reduce this, specifically they could block activation of any cards with codes for which they've already started receiving activation/balance checks. There'd still be some risk (thieves would need to wait before testing cards and would have to hope for cards that were purchased but not yet redeemed) but it could be reduced somewhat.

So you could use your existing apps but not download new ones from the App Store.

You could use iMessage with some restrictions. You could use Apple Music but only the free radios. You could use Apple’s photos but would lose sync.

Usability depends on how much you rely on those services, but the device itself is still useable for other things.

So, we now have the same “who cares, it’s just some dumb online account” level of service with much more critical accounts. Because big tech has scaled users to the 9-10 figure range, while not investing almost anything in customer service. Instead of having thousands of CSRs like the phone company, tech employs a few disempowered call center operators overseas, whose only job is to read FAQ answers at callers and ask them to try restarting their computers.

Believe it or not, google is even more stunningly incompetent than that.

If you have someone in your contacts there literally is no way to (1) retain him/her, and (2) ensure they are never, ever, for any reason, suggested in any product. eg in google docs, I do not want "@" autocompletions to suggest the person. No sharing, no drive sharing, no email cc/bcc, etc.

In my case, there was a breakup with a cofounder / exit from a company and ongoing collaboration with a friend who shared the same first name. I actually had to delete the former cofounder's contact, which made me miss some calls from an unknown number.

Having someone that you need to occasionally maintain contact with that should never be prompted in any way (exes of all types, divorced, stalker) is a basic need in real-world systems.