It wasn't a sketchy retailer though, it was one Apple has authorized through its handpicked affiliate (in the US, this is probably Blackhawk who basically owns the third-party-giftcard-sales business).

For Apple to say "Don't buy gift cards from our authorized retailers, or prepare to face incredibly harsh consequences due to fraud that you can't detect or predict" while continuing to sell them through those channels is morally bankrupt and completely unacceptable.

I have no doubt fraud is a big problem. It is for all gift cards. But this is a 3 trillion dollar company -- and they make minimum 30% of every gift card sold in pure profit. If they can't secure those channels without torpedoing innocent customers' entire digital lives, they need to drop that channel.

It was locked for a week because of the social media fuss that not everyone can raise. Otherwise it'd be forever.

Your comment reminds me of this news story of a guy trapped in his work's elevator for the weekend. How was he supposed to know it'll be only for the weekend.

Hah, because it went viral. Good luck if you aren't able to reach a wide audience (99% of people aren't). Else it would've been locked for eternity. Stop defending atrocious behavior like this.

Weird hill to die on bud.

If somebody bought something from Walmart you wouldn’t insinuate he’s at fault because he bought it from a ‘sketchy retailer’. Just stop it lol. There is literally no way to defend Apple on that one.

Having your purchase taken away is not punishment. It's done because it's not actually yours, it still belongs to the person it was stolen from. It's a negative for the person who made the purchase, but that's just an unfortunate side effect. Unknowingly buying stolen property is not legally wrong. The typical law punishing receiving stolen property requires the receiver to know that it is stolen. Otherwise you're innocent of any wrongdoing, you just got ripped off.

If unknowingly using a stolen gift card just meant you lost your money, nobody would be complaining about Apple's behavior here. The issue is that they didn't just lose their money, they also got their account locked, which locks up a lot of stuff completely unrelated to gift cards.

You will have your stolen property taken away, you won't have your entire house lock with bars and get evicted from the property.

Terrible analogy. The victim here bought the card from the retailer. Someone else had gained access to the secret contained on the card and stolen or attempted to steal the value on the card because Apple can't figure out how to sell a gift card securely.

Our victim was the victim of the only theft that involved the gift card. Then Apple stole the person's whole digital life with no recourse because they are ham-fisted and don't care.