Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
145 comments
·December 13, 2025x3sphere
cemoktra
Well from my view as European working in finance. Handling money for customers to pay (buy apps) likely requires an e money license (not sure about other states). And with this there is lot of things coming, like AML and what not. So disabling the account might be due to regulations required for the e money license.
Of course Support should be able to resolve this if proves are given
scoot
That doesn't explain why an entire account is shut down, rather than just use of gift cards. Hammer to crack an egg, and just plain lazy/incompetent
monksy
> And with this there is lot of things coming, like AML and what not
Whats coming?
nine_k
Anti Money Laundering measures.
Gift cards are often used for money laundering or scams, because they allow to transfer monetary value in small increments and without tracking: there's no link between the person who bought a gift card (anonymously with cash) and a person who used its code to put money onto an account.
bbbhltz
Money laundering, I think.
AML = Anti Money Laundering
aengelke
> What's the rationale?
Gift cards are used by phishers. In our institution, we routinely get personalized spam mails (in the name of the corresponding group lead of the recipient, sent via GMail -- this is not low-effort) that ask whether they are available and, when (accidentally) responding, ask for Apple gift cards.
kstrauser
My coworkers report these to me every single business day. They’re usually like:
> Hey, it’s me, your CEO. I’m in a meeting with our big customer and I need an urgent favor. Thanks! You’re a life saver.
> - Mr. CEO
null
beeflet
anything can trigger this. it is totally at the company's discretion
breppp
> It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this. What's the rationale?
If I need to guess, gift cards are sold online in money laundering schemes, also on some platforms they are used to let you buy apps from a lower priced country
userbinator
To paraphrase an old saying: Live by Big Tech, die by Big Tech.
After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer
I've heard others say this (and was a "loyal advocate" of Windows for around 2 decades myself), but the reality is they simply do not care. You are merely a single user out of several billion.
Many of the reps I’ve spoken to have suggested strange things
That almost sounds like some sort of AI, not a human. But if I were in your situation I'd be inclined to print out that response as evidence, and then actually go there physically to see what happens.
trinsic2
This is why I don't use an os that depends on cloud functionality built into the os for much of its fuctionality. It's really stupid IMHO to depend on a closed system like this to store data.
christoph
I think we must have passed peak Apple this week or something…
I’ve had Clone Hero running badly on an ancient MacBook for my drums, so I decided to swap it out for an M1 Mini that was collecting dust on a shelf. I did a full erase, but I couldn’t get past its activation lock. At all.
This is a piece of hardware I purchased on my credit card, for my company, (luckily) linked to a phone number I control and an email address on a domain I can control, but Apple in their infinite wisdom are still locking me out of my own hardware because I don’t know the password the last employee used on the computer! I don’t want any data off it, thats gone, I just want the computer I spent money on to actually be usable!
I initiated a “recovery” process to unlock it (at Apples discretion?) and they’ve sent me an automated email saying the initial checks are passed and they will contact me again in 7 calendar days. Kafka-esque doesnt even begin to describe it. So for the next week I have to whistle Dixie!
I’ve been a massive Apple fanboy since I swore off Windows a couple of decades ago, giving them a decent high 6 figure spend over that time and influencing countless others to buy Apple devices. Well that very much ended this week & going forwards without Apple will be painful, but the message they sent me couldn’t have been any louder & clearer. The writing has been slowly creeping on to the wall for the last few years, between buckling to UK government pressure, the CSAM photo scanning nonsense, the absolute UI abomination of this new glass crap, this was my final straw.
I’m also going to be relaying their “message” very clearly and loudly now to any friend or family member considering another Apple device.
kingleopold
with this same logic, you don't want to know how much your government and your country cares about you. odds are even a lot lower for them.
freddie_mercury
Why would my government care less about me than a multinational corporation with billions of customers that isn't headquartered or listed where I live?
My Member of Parliament represents about 130,000 people, does regular door knocking to talk to people, and has a staffed office a few km away the I can walk into anytime I want.
None of that applies to a multinational corporation.
PunchyHamster
oh, no, they will do a lot to make you pay taxes
compounding_it
My 2 cents:
There was a time when I accidentally deleted some photos of which I had only one copy. I blamed myself for being stupid not having a copy but also money was tight for additional drives.
Then there is this: depending on a service provider and then blaming them for something like this. The problem is that now you are losing trust in service providers (of which there should be little to begin with) and on top of that you are also blaming yourself for depending on them. However you have to create a trust model where your fault allows you to have a service helping you with it while a fault at the service provider will allow you to restore data from your end too, getting the best of both worlds.
MacOS and Windows / Google with always logged in systems that lock you out completely at their will is an example of how your devices are not owned by you to begin with and then trusting them with your data as well means your digital life is basically owned by them completely.
Now imagine that there are no humans to solve this but endless LLM bots that respond with generic responses because the LLM has never seen a problem like this. I want to point out that owning your data and hardware is really important if you depend on it and your business especially does.
ryanjshaw
I think this argument conflates “what’s possible” with “what’s reasonable”.
In a complex modern society, we can’t all be expected to have backup plans to the Nth degree.
Is it possible to bore for my own water supply, install solar+inverter/battery backup for electricity, get a medical degree to treat my own wounds? Sure but most would say it’s not reasonable.
It’s why we have regulations and ombudsmans for healthcare, transport, finance, water provider, electricity providers, communications providers etc.
Oddly missing from that list is critical technical infrastructure providers like Microsoft, Apple and Google.
compounding_it
> However you have to create a trust model where your fault allows you to have a service helping you with it while a fault at the service provider will allow you to restore data from your end too, getting the best of both worlds.
This is why I suggested to have a dual model. Leveraging the cloud and services is really a good choice as long as you have backup systems running independently as well. Your backups may not be as powerful and full fledged as the main provider but in case of emergencies like these, you still own your data and hardware and don’t panic.
In this example a weekly backup of iCloud to a drive connected to a pi with rsync could be a simple solution. 6tb is not even that much given that 500$ gift cards are being used by the author. The backup is not great but it is easy to see why it’s also necessary to own your data.
snowe2010
That is in no way a reasonable suggestion. You’re suggesting a raspberry pi (first red flag) along with a command line program. This is not reasonable in any sense of the word. Imagine me suggesting that everyone should be set up their own unraid server to make sure they can still stream movies and videos if Netflix goes down. Imagine me telling you you should set up a foundry to build your own engines because you can’t trust big car manufacturers. This is the case with everything in your life
Regulations exist because it’s impossible for any one person to handle everything that needs to be handled.
Beijinger
Since your money is gone, I would file a complaint here:
ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission): The primary enforcer of gift card laws, ensuring businesses comply with the three-year minimum expiry, clear terms, and fair practices.
parisidau
Absolutely, but that doesn't solve my immediate issue of my devices and accounts, but of course I will do that.
bbarnett
There are escalative methods to employ in such situations.
In many legal jurisdictions, a 'demand letter' holds weight. These can be served by courier, with proof of delivery as valid. One aspect of such a letter is a hard, specific time by which you will start legal action, along with associated additional costs.
You have two paths after the letter. The first is small claims court, or normal court. In many places, small claims court does not allow lawyers, and the judge will even have to explain any confusing terms.
Which means the playing is leveled, including reduced or no disclosure requirements, and legal cost assignments. Where I am, it's $100 to file.
The goal is to force a fix, at threat of legal consequences.
I am sending an email.
shermozle
Book a date with TASCAT. I haven't used the Tasmanian one but in NSW it cost me a couple tens of dollars from memory and I got a response in days. Once the case lands with the _LAWYERS_ who are expensive, it'll get resolved.
inkyoto
Civil tribunals in Australia (an equivalent of small claim courts in other countries) do not involve lawyers in vast majority of cases and encourage self-representation instead.
In fact, the NSW Civil Administrative Tribunal explicitly requires the Tribunal’s explicit permission for a person to be represented by somebody else, including a lawyer.
But tribunal's decision is binding on the commercial entity, should it be found at fault and incurs penalties for avoidance or non-compliance with the decision.
sho
Wow. This is a cautionary tale. I don't think I'd be as devastated as this poor chap, but as it grew I realize I've allowed my iCloud photo library to become a single copy.
How are people handling this these days? If i wanted to ensure a full backup of everything on my iCloud to a NAS, what's the best way these days? Seems like they make it difficult by design..
beala
I self host an Immich [1] instance to backup photos on my iPhone. It’s OSS and has a level of polish I’ve rarely seen in free software. Really, it’s shockingly good. The iOS app whisks my photo off to my home server several times per day.
What I’m not sure about is how to backup things like iMessages, Notes, and my Contacts. Every time I’ve looked, it appears the only options are random GitHub scripts that have reverse engineered the iMessage database.
unsnap_biceps
I run a nextcloud [1] instance and use it for contacts, calendars, and reminders
snowe2010
The imessage db is literally just a sqlite db. If you have a Mac you can read the entire thing with an applescript. It’s really easy from what I remember from years ago
css
What's wrong with `imessage-exporter`?
firecall
One rather counter intuitive way to “backup” your photos is to install Google Photos and One Drive on your iPhone!
Google and MS don’t charge as much as Apple for storage, and you probably need you need to pay beyond the free limits, but it’s not a huge expense.
Once your installed Google Photos and One Drive on your iPhone, just tell the apps to sync all your photos all the time!
Now I appreciate that isn’t for everyone.
But it works, is reliable, and requires no technical knowledge of running your own service.
The other thing to do is setup a Mac that synchs all your iCloud data, One Drive documents and Google Drive.
Then back up that device with Backblaze.
This gets expensive as a Mac with decent levels of storage isn’t cheap!
I live in fear everyday or my primary Apple and Google accounts getting locked!
I’ve had accounts since day one of iTools and very shortly after Gmail launched….
raw_anon_1111
The issue with OneDrive is that it doesn’t store metadata like the photo location, its damn near useless. But I do pay for storage for Google Photos and iCloud.
If you take all of your photos from your phone, you don’t need your Mac at all. Google Photos will sync directly.
I wouldn’t use BackBlaze (the $7 a month service). It doesn’t support NAS at all and it has to phone home every 30 days or it will erase anything that is stored on external drive.
I would use an app that backs up to their B2 service.
I personally just use my personal AWS account to back up my Plex media and just use the AWS s3 sync command using the AWS CLI and store everything in S3 Deep Archive. It’s less than $2 a month for 2TB.
snowe2010
Backblaze doesn’t erase after 30 days… I’ve had a computer be offline from it for several months and it still retained all data. And you can use the backblaze docker container to run on a NAS, much much much cheaper than B2.
Wasabi is much cheaper than AWS as well.
Finally the best solution for backing up your iCloud Photos is definitely Immich. Set it up on your own NAS or a VPS, back up to that, and then back up that server to an S3 storage using rsync or restic. I’ll note that I still backup to Backblaze because its so dang cheap.
I spent months trying to find the best setup a few months ago and this is by far the cheapest.
But still, this shouldn’t be required for normal people. They should get what they pay for.
jval43
I run a separate Mac Mini that has the full iCloud Photos library on a massive external drive, set to "Download originals". I then rsync that filesystem to a separate Linux box. This works but you must not ever disconnect the external drive.
I don't have a solution for iCloud Drive, as there wasn't a keep offline setting last time I checked. So use it only ephemerally.
unsnap_biceps
Arq [1] has an option to "materialize" dataless files, basically forcing them to be locally available. The only issue is if it's a large file and it gets pushed off device often, you can burn a lot of bandwidth re-downloading it over and over again.
NaOH
At least as of Sequoia, the Settings > iCloud > Drive > Optimize Mac Storage option enables iCloud Drive files to be stored offline. Likewise, right clicking any iCloud Drive files in the Finder includes a Keep Downloaded option. Since I minimally use iCloud Drive, in the past (older OSes) I also had Hazel make copies of iCloud Drive files so they were certain to be in backups.
4jck
I'm not familiar with the "Photos Library.app", but I have an m4 mini with my photos in a Photo's Library. I'd love to know your script to rsync the photos into a separate drive/directory
yardstick
I run a Synology NAS with a docker container that periodically downloads new iCloud Photos to a local directory.
sho
this? https://github.com/boredazfcuk/docker-icloudpd
seems pretty high touch. A lot of hoop-jumping if you don't have a mac in the middle
yardstick
Yeah that’s the one.
I do have a Mac so it didn’t seem difficult to me, but I accept it will be for those that don’t.
leobg
Thanks. I had no idea something like that existed.
How do we know using such a tool won’t trigger an account lockout? How ironic would that be.
JoshTriplett
> How are people handling this these days?
Syncthing is wonderful, and does a great job of syncing between an Android phone's photos/videos and a laptop. And if you have regular automated backups of the laptop, you'll have backups of the photos/videos too.
For an iPhone, perhaps you could use iTunes to sync to a computer and back up that computer.
4k93n2
sushtrain seems like the best option for syncthing at the moment. its a bit more polished than mobius. neither of them sync in the background but i think i remember seeing someone using shortcuts to open the sushitrain app every now and again to wake it up so it would sync
mhammerc
I run Arq Backup automatically in the background.
It copy Photos, iCloud files and my mails once every days to S3 with incremental backups.
It requires to have a full copy locally.
Works great!
It is not hard to configure once, with the proper folders and settings.
sho
> It requires to have a full copy locally.
yeah that's the thing. When my iPhotos library exceeded 1TB I lost the ability to store the full local copies. Since then, iCloud itself has been the sole source.
Looks like there's some decent, reasonably priced apps to handle this like https://apps.apple.com/us/app/parachute-backup/id6748614170?... (no affiliation)
mikepurvis
I recently rebuilt my home server as an unraid machine. Currently it’s mainly torrents and a Minecraft server but it’s got 10tb of locally redundant storage with a sightline to scale that to around 24tb, so it would be a logical place to store a full gphotos copy.
leoxiong
You can request an archive of all your data (including photos and drive) in 25gb chunks.
mh-
Thanks, I have the same problem and need to do something about it.
I wonder if it can calculate (estimate) how big of an external disk I'll need. My wife and I each have 40-50k photos and a few thousand videos in iCloud Photos.
Timshel
10TB external harddrives are relatively affordable.
null
geekologist
immich is an extremely polished, FOSS alternative to google/apple photos. It's an investment, but a 4 bay NAS running immich should do nicely. Additionally I backup snapshots to Backblaze B2 via restic which runs another $5/TB
redrove
For me personally Immich is a non-starter because its not end-to-end encrypted.
snowe2010
Why would you need it to be end to end encrypted anyway? You’re running it. Set it to only upload photos when you’re on your home network and you’re fine. Or fork it and make a PR and make it e2e encrypted.
InsideOutSanta
It runs on your own hardware. There is nobody else who has access to unencrypted data.
iamnothere
This is one of the worst stories I’ve seen yet. It sounds like they were “all in” on Apple with zero backups, which shows some questionable judgment, but still, this sort of thing shouldn’t be possible any more than a bank deciding to take all your money with no recourse. (They can close your account, but they can’t keep your money.) Maybe hosts should be required to mail you a hard drive with your data on it when they close your account. Regardless, never assume cloud data is in safe hands.
0manrho
> which shows some questionable judgment
Convenience is a hell of a drug.
parisidau
I do have backups of most data, including photos, but there are things you can't backup like shared actively edited iWork documents, and things like that. I can rebuild from it, but it's still a shitshow and my very expensive devices are bricked.
nickhodge
When you are an Apple Developer, as the poster states - it goes deeper and more destructive.
st3fan
Great victim blaming there buddy.
beeflet
To what extent is the victim their own perpetrator? They allow the status quo to succeed by endorsing it. They voted for this with $30,000 of their own money, and they will likely vote again.
knallfrosch
read the TOS before agreeing
gigatexal
Come on Apple do the right thing here. Surely there are some people from Apple reading this in the comments
manav
Last time I had this problem, I got it fixed after applying for and accepting a job at Apple.
valleyer
Send this in an e-mail to tcook@apple.com. He has a team that reads for stuff like this and can magically fix issues.
I've had to do it before, also for a gift-card-related problem (different from yours), and I was contacted by a member of the Apple executive escalations team a couple days later.
parisidau
It's been done, a few days ago. Nothing yet, but here's hoping.
valleyer
Good. Don't be afraid to follow up if they drag their feet. Be respectful but persistent. I'm sorry this is happening to you. It's a shitty feeling.
wahnfrieden
I don't see stories anymore from this working. Back when it was under Jobs, there were more concessions from his team operating the account. And maybe in the early Cook years. Apple has trimmed a lot of fat.
I did read about part of the product development org having a standup about trending social media cases, and prioritizing followup on items that were under public scrutiny.
valleyer
Mine happened earlier this year, FWIW.
Believe me, I have no desire to defend Apple. Their behavior absolutely sucks. I just want a good resolution for the author of this blog post.
kalleboo
I have a friend who did this last year after he had a poor support experience with AppleCare for his Apple Watch and he got a call from Executive support early the next morning
wahnfrieden
Good to know. They certainly don't care for emails about my dead AirPods Max (flex cable designed to fail after enough rotations back and forth)
hnthrowawy477
This happened to me really early on when my original Apple ID had an invalid format, as it was an ID made prior to the current version of Apple ID everyone uses, and Apple refused to port what I owned to the ID that I was forced to generate to sign into my newer device. My old ID had software no longer available in App Store, so this wasn’t just a matter of needing to repurchase apps- they were taking away my ability to use applications I bought from them. Since then, I’ve been incredibly wary of losing my Apple ID. I have a lot of respect for Apple, but I would bet that it’s easier to deal with ID related problems for someone with Q level clearance in the U.S. government or even a non-existent Men In Black ID problem than to resolve a problem with an Apple ID. They probably would tell the almighty to get a new ID.
tiku
I went back to an MacBook pro M5, after being away from Apple for a year or 5 (Lenovo etc). I tried to re-enable my apple account but I had to wait 5(!) days to change the password. I ended up making another account.
larodi
If this person with all his Apple-centric work cannot get personal support from Apple, well then perhaps no one does get it anyway.
It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this. What's the rationale? It would make more sense if they just locked the person out of redeeming gift cards or something, not the entire account.
But reading horror stories like this is is why I only use the very bare minimum of any of these cloud services. Keep local copies of everything. For developer accounts, I always create them under a separate email so they're not tied to my personal. At least it can minimize the damage somewhat.
It sucks that I have to take all these extra precautions though. It's definitely made me develop a do not trust any big corp mindset.