Visa gift cards never were widely accepted since they are so often used for fraud.

actually i stand corrected she said she couldnt use it anywhere online but no issues using offline.

Hello,

I work for a major gift card company. These views are my own and not that of my employer.

The credit card companies take zero risk in this transaction, because we, the company selling the gift card, take the risk.

To this end, my personal job is building systems to prevent and combat credit card fraud. It's not terribly complicated in fact. The team I originally started with a decade ago was like three people.

Every gift card purchased by a stolen credit card is a direct loss to our revenue. We strongly want to keep that amount small. We do a pretty good job of it.

We have a large department of REAL HUMANS you can call to get help with your gift card. In the past, they have had very upset grandmas calling in to ask about why they can't purchase iTunes gift cards because they need them to get their nephew out of prison. Those calls are very sad.

Physical gift cards have no value until you pay the cashier. Despite this, physical gift card security is tough. The plastic card has to be shipped out and sit on a shelf and be directly available to anyone to tamper with. We have made some efforts to reduce that threat, but there isn't much we can do.

If you are in the US you have absolutely used our company's products and if you have bought a gift card online there's a 90% chance your transaction details have run through my code.

Frankly, I do not understand why Apple would have banned an account for trying to redeem a scammed or tampered with card. That doesn't make any sense.

In a genuine and everyday real sense, no, your likely thousand dollar device is not usable. The App Store requires an account to download from. Internal services and apps often complain about not being available. You are mostly stuck with whatever built in, non-cloud services the device comes with, which isn't much. Weather and mail fetching come to mind. Maybe some of the simple recording / note taking like apps. A working Apple ID is essentially a requirement to actually use the device you purchase. And yes there will be comments from folks about "ways" you can perhaps sideload or get things running, but to a regular person that simply uses a phone like a standard appliance in their life - they're stuck.

This is one of the reasons the used market for Apple devices is absolutely fraught with danger. If an Apple ID is left active on the device, only Apple can reset it. In most cases, they will only do that if they are provided the original purchase receipt for the serial number associated with the device. So in theory, removing the activation lock from owned devices is possible in a situation where a locked apple ID cannot be recovered if you are the original owner. IMO, there should be a process to release devices that haven't been used for a certain amount of time AND haven't been reported stolen. But there's very little incentive for Apple to do this.

If you read the other posts about this, the author explains that the phone technically still works, but you can't access iMessage or anything. Probably basic text and calls only.

Yes, you can continue to use anything that doesn’t require using Apple services.

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.

Why can't you make a new one?

Not really. I have an iPad without an Apple account and you can’t do much with it.

That said, I choose to use it this way and it does everything I need it to.