I had similar trouble redeeming a gift card on Amazon. Twice. (thankfully they got resolved upon appeal).

Enough that I am very wary of buying or redeeming gift cards now, especially more than one in a row.

Apparently there's some sort of scam with gift cards, which must affect any platform which allows them, and legit uses often get flagged by automated systems.

If they are so much trouble for Amazon/Apple I wonder why not disallow gift cards, instead of randomly banning users?

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zx85wes 3 days ago | parent [-]

Going through this at the moment. Was it a physical card? What evidence of purchase did they ask you to provide?

	▲	the_af 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		It was a couple of years ago, it was virtual cards (I think one was a card given as reward by one of those legit review sites - edit: Gartner or one like those - which will reward you for providing reviews, and the other was money I had elsewhere that I converted to an Amazon card). I remember I went through some automated process which asked me for some account details, and after a few hours (fewer than one day, I remember as much) my account was unlocked. It was scary! What I remember puzzled me is that it was only two low-value cards. I would have understood the system being triggered by a lot of low value transactions, or a few large ones... but these were few and low value! Go figure. Sorry I don't remember more details. All I know is it made me scared of gift cards.