Someone reported on Hardwarezone that her US iTuneStore account was suspended. A check with Apple showed that the Gift Certificate she redeemed was purchased using a stolen credit card. This girl purchased the Gift Certificate from the iTuneshop.net, and iTuneshop.net claimed innocent, saying that the Gift Certificate was not purchased using credit card, and hinting that Apple mess up the whole thing.

However, I believe Apple’s statement carry more weight. They have no reason whatsoever to suspend customer’s account, when credit and money are involved. They will get a unpopular publication if they do that by mistake.

We know that hacker steal credit card information so that he can resell it for profit. Now putting everything together, let me make a hypothesis scenario:

  1. Some victim’s credit card information was stolen, by thief.
  2. Thief sell this credit card to a Gift Certificate Supplier.
  3. Gift Certificate Supplier buy a lot of gift certs from Apple.
  4. Gift Certificate Supplier resell those certs to iTuneshop.net, below the published price
  5. iTuneshop sell the cert to us at publish price, earning the differences.

Such chain is not too complex to understand, but we can see how fraudulent it can be if you purchased things online.

I was amazed by how people can get the gift cert below cost and resell to us. My only explanation was that it is like Apple Store Gift Card sold in local iShop, where they bought from Apple directly with some discount and resell it at published cost. But if you visit Hogewe80.com, you can see that he was trying to get the certs from US supplier. I do not think the discount given by Apple is huge enough to sustain two resell activities. That make the fraudulent case highly probable in this case.

So, it looks like we are still unable to buy things safely with a US iTune account.

Advertisement