I’ve seen some complaints online recently about people no longer being able to buy iTunes Gift Cards to be sent by email, or that iTunes Gift Card amounts are now being limited. In fact, our account is one of the ones affected by this: our company iTunes account suddenly became unable to buy Gift Cards on iTunes. We get the message:
A little research (links here and here) makes it clear that
- Other developers and users are seeing this as well
- Apple is acknowledging it, but not yet publicly providing very specific info or resetting the affected accounts
- It looks very much like it’s an anti-fraud action by Apple
Now, before everyone leaps to the wrong conclusion, I’m completely in favor of this. I’ve seen plenty of credit card fraud, and whatever anyone can do to fight it has my complete support.
So, to help out anyone who’s affected by this and hasn’t figured out what to do about it yet, here’s our simple workaround that Julie figured out.
- Go to the nearby drugstore and buy iTunes Gift Cards
- Email the codes on them to whoever you need to
I hope Apple will be able to come up with a solution that lets us go back to doing everything online, and I’m definitely still hoping that Apple will implement “Gift this App” for iTunes apps. But meanwhile, the above works fine.