From my experiences with people at Apple, everyone seems so siloed that it doesn't surprise me that they couldn't help him. It doesn't seem like they have the culture where you could just drop by the Apple fraud team and ask for help for a friend.
Or, they hit the brick wall that is US anti-money laundering laws. It’s illegal to “tip off” (warn) the person if they’ve tripped the AML checks.
At that point, it doesn’t matter how many friends you have on the inside, unless you’ve got one that’s ignorant of the law or willing to risk the penalties.
If he succeeds, perhaps you shouldn't care. If he fails, you should care, because that means that the average person will certainly fail. They will lose the cancer test results on their iPhone, the job they use the iPhone for, possibly their home, the copies of their birth certificate on their iPhone, and the friends they could crash with but whose phone numbers they've forgotten because they only communicate with them through iMessage.
You don't care that massive unaccountable corporations control all our data, devices and connectivity, and can lock us out of all of that on a whim or accidentally, and refuse to fix the problem?
This could happen to anyone. It can happen to people trusting Apple with their data, to people using Google, Microsoft, Amazon, or any other big cloud platform.
This deserves everybody's attention, and also a massive lawsuit to force these corporations to treat our data more responsibly.
