Hey.paris

https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/ > The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale)

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.

>as long as I have access to my Gmail I think you should be more cautious about relying on the services of a company like Google that can arbitrarily decide to remove your account data or access. Similar, though the person was fortunate enough to regain access: https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/ You can mitigate hardware failure and data loss, especially for a simple key, but you may not be able to prevent Google from deciding your account is gone one day.

I've been so tempted to try out the apple password manager, I'm fully vested in their ecosystem, but the lock in is too big for me to feel comfortable with. This is the sort of stuff that terrifies me https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

I think you are confused. The issue is about getting locked out of your own data, which can easily happen in a number of cases. And you don't necessarily need to actually have your account banned. Let's just say you signed up for a Microsoft account when setting up for a new PC (well, because you have to). You don't use that account anywhere else, and you forgot the password, even though you can log in via PIN or something else. Now you install Linux or just boot to a different system once. When you need to boot to Windows again, good luck. And that's just one of the cases. A real disaster happened to someone, although on a different platform, and the context is a bit different: https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

This might be why Apple Gift cards can lock you out of iCloud [1] since they are using a 3rd party. People at Apple who are intermediaries have strict rules not to unlock due to fraud and those processes can’t be undone easily? [1]https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/ This guy purchased a gift card which turned out to be dodgy, and Apple locked his entire account. So there's definitely some kind of shenanigans possible with the current supply chain.

Gift cards: it's a steal, so just say no. I want to say if you get one from your sister-in-law give it back but now I'm afraid she'll face terrible consequences from cashing it out. ... note an update on this story: Paris got his account unblocked today, thanks to the story being covered here and throughout the blogosphere. It's a good outcome but not a path open to most people: https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

His iPhone could not sync, update, install new software, or send messages, nor could he sign out and use a new apple ID with it to restore that functionality. For a phone, this is effectively bricked. Paris uses the term "bricked" in the original post: https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

That linked story is pretty horrifying too: https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/ If he can't get his account back in any reasonable amount of time what chance do I have? (I see I missed a big HN discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252114 - 1038 comments)

"20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple" by Paris Buttfield-Addison: https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

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!

This is the original blogpost https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/ The reddit thread https://www.reddit.com/r/theprimeagen/comments/1plv44v/20_years_of_dig… Please update the link in the post

> notice how those 3 previous articles you linked don't contain "The Blahbity Blah" style headers throughout, while this article has nine occurrences of them. The post https://hey.paris/posts/cba/ has five bold "And..." headers, which is even worse than "The..." headers. Would AI do that? The more plausible explanation is that the writer just has a somewhat annoying blogging style, or lack of style.

Yes. https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/