This was a scary story to read after I cashed out all my rewards points at work for the first time in 5.5 years to get six $100 Apple gift cards which I redeemed back-to-back-to-back.

the combination of single account for everything and arbitrary account locking is really scary, given how much of their lives people entrust to these services. anecdotally i have steered strictly clear of google cloud for my personal projects (even though i have some cases where firebase would have worked nicely) because i cannot risk some screw up locking me out of gmail.

I remember an HN post where someones google account got locked out when they tried to add funds using their Apple Card.

I just had my mom purchase a $100 gift card for my son. Now I have to go to the Apple Store to redeem it… how fun

The answer to the question is NO. Unless you don't care at all about your Apple account.

That’s unfortunate. I will not be buying or recommending Apple Gift Cards going forward.

How and why would someone tamper an Apple Gift Card?

dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307023

I bought and ipad on the online apple store, on their back to university programme (in the UK). I was overcharged by around £80 (the price of the gift card they gave me as part of the back to university offer, basically the web site charged me for the gift card). I called up their support and explained the situation. For about 10 minutes I had the lady explain to me in the politest tone possible how I didn't understand the calculation, because naturally she believed that the Apple web site wouldn't make a mistake. She finally realised that it was wrong after a while and refunded me really quickly, but I think she could've easily gaslit and anverage person into believing they were in the wrong.

do not redeem!