One suspicion is that you're laundering money to yourself. That is, you purchase stolen credit card numbers, then use them to buy your own app, thus turning the cc numbers into actual cash through Apple.
But more so, they don't actually care that much about the whys. If your app draws lots of fraudulent purchases, they want it dead. You're just creating negative revenue (when the fraudulent purchases are reversed) and bad reputation for Apple.
Pretty convenient for Apple that they decide that's your responsibiliy instead of theirs. Doesn't Apple dictate that the payment goes through them? If it's such a crime to process these transactions that the guilty drserve to die for being involved or associated in any way, then they are even more guilty and should have killed themselves by that logic. Man these big guys sure do give themselves a great gig.
I do not understand why the above thread is downvoted. Just because Apple has a problem detecting/controlling fraudulent transactions, they want an app to be dead!
Kill-x-app-as-a-service would be popular among scammers.
Basically everyone involved in payments has sort of an informal tax on them that they pay to reduce payment fraud. But since it's all informal, there's this constant push-and-pull about whose responsibility is exactly to do what.
The way that payment processors see it is that sites that accept payment's duty is to take enough precautions -- based on the nature of their business, the profile of their customers, etc. -- to keep fraud down to a relatively low level. And if your site is a magnet for fraud you've failed to be a good citizen and they're entitled to be harsh with you. They in return eat the primary liability for fraudulent payments -- that is, they may try to recover fraud from the sites, but it's anyone's guess whether they will be able to, while they themselves will always be on the hook for it.
From the perspective of especially smaller sites, it can be like, "Wait, what? What were we supposed to do? How were we supposed to even know that people were using us for fraud?"
There's definitely a lot of room for the payment processors to misbehave and push more liability onto the sites than is perhaps optimal.
The competitor used fake accounts and stolen credit cards to buy his app so he will get suspended. The chargeback costs are heavy so Apple killed the app receiving the purchases.
I don't know. I just read the twitter thread. But chargeback is 25 USD typically (processing fee from credit card companies). I guess Apple gets a discount due to scale but it's still pretty high.
Paypal does this as well; our money (a lot of money) got locked because our competitor (we found out years later because they were bragging about it) used stolen/fake cards to buy our product. They don’t side with their client; they side with the money/least risk and hassle.
Google does the same with adsense; if you have a competitor which makes a good amount with Adsense, just hire a botnet and have it click ads. Happened to us as well.
They should not care about this and just leave it; they know it could be a competitor more likely than it is you (if you make 7 figures for an extended period of time, why would you suddenly do this?); if they can detect suspicious behaviour, why do they care about it and not just filter it? But nope; you get axed and no one cares. It is really very important to make sure you don’t trust one platform when real real starts coming in.
If you are around long enough, you will have many bad platform stories. Every moment I see money coming in via 1 source, I get nervous and start planning to diversify that dependency.
At the moment Stripe stories keep popping up over here; if you make a lot of money, you should have multiple alternatives or, better, get very close to an acquirer; they will answer your calls and the fees will be lower too; sure it’s more integration work, but if you make enough money, why is that more important than securing your future?
Something about this whole thing seems off. It seems like a made up story to promote whatever real estate shenanigans this guy is into. I noticed he lists "YC" in his twitter bio, is he a YC founder?
Apple isn’t legally obligated to send you details about why they deplatformed you, why should they be? The net is riddled with story’s like OPs and never does it end with “I threatened the trillion dollar company with my $200/h lawyer, and they caved!”
Yeah but if you sue they have to at a minimum respond. It might just be a bunch of affirmative defenses but at least you'll have a human rep "at Apple" working on your case. I don't know if they are incentivized to wrap up suits via no-pay settlements.
Just $10k would be 50 hours @ $200. Maybe his cashflow was such that he couldn't manage this by that time but coming up against like $1M revenue a year it seems silly to do all that other weird stuff (like crashing some kid's birthday party? hope that was an exaggeration) and not do the one thing that guarantees some type of attention & response.
A lawyer starts a letter writing process which stretches for months. You will win in the end but it will cost you a lot. With Apples ToS you can't really do much, they are very well protected and the costs would be prohibitive.
From my experience, there are many cases where involving a lawyer makes a hard problem much harder.
A customer wouldn't pay for our outsourcing work so we left where there was still a significant debt. Contacted a lawyer who took a fee up front. Multiple letters, meetings, etc. Went to initial hearing where the judge was very much on our side and derided their people.
Then the lawyer explained that we would win but with appeal this will take 3 years. Or we can settle for 1/3rd of what was owed to me. The stress in the court room isn't for me. I settled and took the loss. Add the lawyer fees, time wasted and stress. Not worth the effort in that case.
It did. I got a 3rd of what I was owed overall. It included a bit for lawyer expenses but the lawyer took extra from my share for "success" and obviously there's the advance I paid him in the first place. So I did get a bit of money but if you take my time into consideration... Not worth the expense.
I had another problematic customer a few years later and I just stopped it after the letter writing process. Not worth the aggravation. Luckily these are two very rare occasions. I pick and choose my customers since then.
Do you have any legal recourse if Apple suspends your account? I thought it basically boils down to "it's their app store, you agreed to the ToS, sucks to be you"?
The ToS doesn't mention that "the most connected angel investor" can fix your account but apparently that works. Apple doesn't follow their own ToS; they use realpolitik like everyone else. If you can flip their perception so that the cost of banning you (e.g. due to the threat of a lawsuit) is higher than the cost of unbanning you... they will unban you.
The cynic in me. Are we supposed to buy into his real estate stuff now? This entire thing reads like a pseudo-ad, no real information, I don't even know what his 7 figure app is...
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 68.4 ms ] threadAlso how do you sell a mobile app without a mobile ecosystems? It’s someone else’s platform all the way down.
But more so, they don't actually care that much about the whys. If your app draws lots of fraudulent purchases, they want it dead. You're just creating negative revenue (when the fraudulent purchases are reversed) and bad reputation for Apple.
Kill-x-app-as-a-service would be popular among scammers.
The way that payment processors see it is that sites that accept payment's duty is to take enough precautions -- based on the nature of their business, the profile of their customers, etc. -- to keep fraud down to a relatively low level. And if your site is a magnet for fraud you've failed to be a good citizen and they're entitled to be harsh with you. They in return eat the primary liability for fraudulent payments -- that is, they may try to recover fraud from the sites, but it's anyone's guess whether they will be able to, while they themselves will always be on the hook for it.
From the perspective of especially smaller sites, it can be like, "Wait, what? What were we supposed to do? How were we supposed to even know that people were using us for fraud?"
There's definitely a lot of room for the payment processors to misbehave and push more liability onto the sites than is perhaps optimal.
Google does the same with adsense; if you have a competitor which makes a good amount with Adsense, just hire a botnet and have it click ads. Happened to us as well.
They should not care about this and just leave it; they know it could be a competitor more likely than it is you (if you make 7 figures for an extended period of time, why would you suddenly do this?); if they can detect suspicious behaviour, why do they care about it and not just filter it? But nope; you get axed and no one cares. It is really very important to make sure you don’t trust one platform when real real starts coming in.
If you are around long enough, you will have many bad platform stories. Every moment I see money coming in via 1 source, I get nervous and start planning to diversify that dependency.
At the moment Stripe stories keep popping up over here; if you make a lot of money, you should have multiple alternatives or, better, get very close to an acquirer; they will answer your calls and the fees will be lower too; sure it’s more integration work, but if you make enough money, why is that more important than securing your future?
Just $10k would be 50 hours @ $200. Maybe his cashflow was such that he couldn't manage this by that time but coming up against like $1M revenue a year it seems silly to do all that other weird stuff (like crashing some kid's birthday party? hope that was an exaggeration) and not do the one thing that guarantees some type of attention & response.
From my experience, there are many cases where involving a lawyer makes a hard problem much harder.
Then the lawyer explained that we would win but with appeal this will take 3 years. Or we can settle for 1/3rd of what was owed to me. The stress in the court room isn't for me. I settled and took the loss. Add the lawyer fees, time wasted and stress. Not worth the effort in that case.
I had another problematic customer a few years later and I just stopped it after the letter writing process. Not worth the aggravation. Luckily these are two very rare occasions. I pick and choose my customers since then.