Curious that Paypal is getting the hate in the comments here: when did they threaten to permaban him from his software?
Anyhow, constructively, you want to escalate to paper on both your bank and Apple (maybe Paypal as well, your call). Start getting an evidence trail together with certified mail, return receipt requested. Apple will kvetch a bit but they (and virtually every other large company) understand the difference between that and a phone call, which you should stop doing immediately, because the contents of them are known to be totally opaque to judges.
You probably won't have to sue anyone, but the demonstrable capability of suing will cause them to escalate this issue internally very, very rapidly.
1. Depending on the jurisdiction, you may ask to record a telephone conversation.
2. Keep a written journal of conversations on the telephone. A paper journal. Dates, times, phone numbers called, full name of person spoken to and their title, matters discussed.
When two parties turn up, it's frequently the case that any admissible written evidence trumps verbal recollection.
That second one is really good advice and the first one is really good advice if you're careful and savvy about it. However, they're both strictly dominated by doing (important) business only on paper. If you really need something resolved, the extent of your phone calls should be finding out what their mailing address is. (And I only say that because the people I used to help with this were mostly non-technical. Most of y'all could Google up the right info in your sleep.)
> However, they're both strictly dominated by doing (important) business only on paper.
Agreed. Writing with two signatures trumps writing by one party which trumps verbal memories of either parties.
I refer readers to the pre-eminent scholar of such matters vis-a-vis minutes, Sir Appleby:
It is characteristic of all committee discussions and decisions that every member has a vivid recollection of them and that every member's recollection of them differs violently from every other member's recollection. Consequently we accept the convention that the official decisions are those and only those which have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials, from which it emerges, with an elegant inevitability, that any decision which has been officially reached will have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials and any decision which is not recorded in the minutes has not been officially reached even if one or more members believe they can recollect it, so in this particular case if the decision had been officially reached it would have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials. And it isn't so it wasn't.
- Get a hold of those minutes. I have to correct the record.
- We can do that?
- Yes, we can. Those minutes are an aide-mémoire for us. They should not be a reductive record of what happened to have been said, but they should be more a full record of what was intended to have been said.
> You probably won't have to sue anyone, but the demonstrable capability of suing will cause them to escalate this issue internally very, very rapidly.
Not even slightly true. They don't care. The cost of the occasional lawsuit is baked into the system cost already.
So my background in this is in consumer debt issues, largely dealing with banks, CC companies, and debt collection agencies. In my pre-HN days, I spent a lot of time hanging out on a message board for folks who had issues with that, after having a credit report that got totally trashed because of a poorly chosen hash function causing my identity to collide with someone else's. Because I have really screwy hobbies I would write letters for folks to send to their banks.
Add the two dozen letters I had to send for myself and I have personal knowledge that this definitively resolved the issue in 40+ cases, in many cases jumping over "our policy is to never...", "you can't do that", and collections at fairly advanced stages.
It is entirely possible that Apple is a tougher nut to crack than BoA or Capital One, but that is not the way that I would bet.
Edit: By the way, this is a catchphrase for me: bureaucracies are stage machines which take paper as input and return outcomes you want. Hackers should be comfortable with paper. Consider it an opportunity to demonstrate your ability to hack non-technical systems.
I do, but given that I discussed my personal financial situation and other thoughts pseudononymously a lot on that forum, I'm going to ask that you respect my privacy and not dig for it.
The brief sketch: credit reporting agencies have Seriously Hard Problems (TM) in determining which identity to associate with an incoming piece of data. For example, suppose you have a file on a Patrick J. McKenzie who once lived in Chicago. You get a report from a hospital that a P.J. MacKenzie in an unspecified town in Illinois (not the actual guy) stiffed them on a $250 medical collection. They sold the debt to a debt collector who, having run a skip trace, determined that I am probably him, and they've reported the debt against my information directly. Do you merge those two identities? By the way, he's also delinquent on $100,000 in other debts.
This sort of thing happens all the time in credit reporting. See my blog post regarding "names are hard."
> They don't care. The cost of the occasional lawsuit is baked into the system cost already.
The cost of run-of-the-mill settlements is baked in, but if they do not quickly and decisively handle every claim, then a person who claims $10M will automatically win. So large companies usually have staff whose job is to clean up disputes with some degree of competence.
Anyhow, constructively, you want to escalate to paper on both your bank and Apple (maybe Paypal as well, your call). Start getting an evidence trail together with certified mail, return receipt requested. Apple will kvetch a bit but they (and virtually every other large company) understand the difference between that and a phone call, which you should stop doing immediately, because the contents of them are known to be totally opaque to judges.
You probably won't have to sue anyone, but the demonstrable capability of suing will cause them to escalate this issue internally very, very rapidly.