Just for the sake of argument, let's say that it's necessary to have some set of unpublished algorithmic rules that are very rarely tripped by honest, normal usage in order to curb fraud.
What happens to the handful of individuals who are not committing fraud, but were just doing uncommon things and accidentally tripped some unpublished anti-fraud measure?
You agree that this isn't ok to just let them hang, right? What's the strategy for helping those people? Certainly, you're not suggesting that it's just ok to essentially say "Fuck you" to the random person who was algorithmically unlucky and essentially have a mega-corporation take a few thousand dollars of their paid for software?
I would say that if you're an entity that employs these kinds of vague, unpublished rules, that there must be a fast, real, and human recourse for talking to somebody to get the problem seriously addressed or you're behaving no better than a criminal entity.
The above was hardly my first comment on this thread, so no, I'm not saying that.
However, OP has talked to humans, and apparently those humans--with access to more info than we have here--believe OP to be a scammer. (Or don't care enough to act.) Since I don't have access to that information, I feel bad for OP, and hope there's a higher level of humans he can talk to, but insinuating that Apple is a criminal entity seems a bit much.
> However, OP has talked to humans, and apparently those humans--with access to more info than we have here--believe OP to be a scammer. (Or don't care enough to act.)
Not every human has equal knowledge, training, and authority to resolve problems. Since I have no clue of the inner-workings of Apple's support centers, I can only give reasonable speculation. How do call centers in big corporations generally work?
The employees (or contractors) are low-ranking members and without much leeway or authority to do anything other than what they're trained to do. They're usually professional enough and probably want to help people, but they're typically only trained and authorized to assist with common tasks they basically have a "script" for: maybe telling you when your order is going to ship or helping you reserve an appointment for a repair, common things like that. If your customer service request fits within the box of common tasks that they're trained and authorized to help with, you're likely good. But if your request is uncommon and they haven't been trained to help you with that, then even this human contact is useless. Maybe they're specifically trained that when they see the word "fraud" on an account profile, that they can't do anything else, and don't even know that a false positive can exist.
It's very easy to see how even with human contact, a circumstance might have been engineered where an unlucky person can slip through the cracks.
> but insinuating that Apple is a criminal entity seems a bit much.
If it's the case that a corporation uses an algorithms that they know could lead to false positives that steals peoples' money, and doesn't provide genuine human support (meaning actual managers and supervisors with authority and training to really investigate a case, not a low-ranking call-center employee with no training or ability to help) then yeah I'd say that they're behaving like a criminal entity.
The caveat here is that I don't know the real details of this case, and I don't know how Apple's customer service staff are trained and operate.
What happens to the handful of individuals who are not committing fraud, but were just doing uncommon things and accidentally tripped some unpublished anti-fraud measure?
You agree that this isn't ok to just let them hang, right? What's the strategy for helping those people? Certainly, you're not suggesting that it's just ok to essentially say "Fuck you" to the random person who was algorithmically unlucky and essentially have a mega-corporation take a few thousand dollars of their paid for software?
I would say that if you're an entity that employs these kinds of vague, unpublished rules, that there must be a fast, real, and human recourse for talking to somebody to get the problem seriously addressed or you're behaving no better than a criminal entity.