As can be easily seen by having a look at job listings on places like Craigslist and Fiverr. A lot of the work offers are obviously for laundering money or transforming stolen goods into cash.
I’d also say that anybody who has worked in retail or any public-facing job that involves handling money knows how frequent and how varied all these scams are.
@tommy But WHY? What’s wrong with Direct Debit (does this exist in the US?) Or simply pay with a normal credit card, or Apple Pay. WHY gift cards?
I note @ace ‘s reason with discounts at retailers, but they are rare (In my country = UK).
Discounted gift cards are pretty common in the USA, especially near the holidays. It’s not unusual to see discounts as high as 15-20% from some retailers.
Simple solution- Always back up your data/system on ofline disks/usb completly independant of apple or cloud. avoid “ all eggs in same basket “. Too err is human, to really screw up takes a computer, and Ai makes the process faster eg a superfast idiot.
Well a complex set of things come together from where this family lives, Ireland and the US, to business and personal use to the whole Family setup. It’s been the simplest solution for us.
Simple solution- Always back up your data/system on ofline disks/usb completly independant of apple or cloud. avoid “ all eggs in same basket “.
Recovering data is not the hard part, loss of use of email address etc would be the painful part.
I use gmail, and depending on settings for archiving in applemail ,I can easily go back to gmail and recover.
So how do you handle it when people trying to email you at your gmail address get undeliverable errors because your account has been closed and deleted?
That’s what could have happened here if Mr. Buttfield-Addison was using an iCloud address. (I believe he said his account was so hold that he had one of the non-email username handles that Apple initially supported until they introduced dotMac.) The equivalent with Gmail is if Google suspends and deletes your Gmail account, which I know has happened to people. For anyone who uses an iCloud email address as their Apple Account, they would have lost the ability to receive email at that address.