In the past month I have run into more payment risk reviews than in the entire year before it.
The reason is simple: I wanted to subscribe to Claude Max and ChatGPT Pro, and I paid for both in the App Store with my Apple Account balance.
Over $100 is where the trouble starts
I gradually noticed a pattern. When I use Apple balance to buy a service in the App Store and a single purchase goes over $100, there is a chance it triggers a risk review. I don’t know how likely that is for other people, but for me it happens a lot. Two of my accounts are now under review, and the reviews have been triggered three times in total.
Every time, dealing with it is a hassle. Just calling Apple’s support advisors takes a lot of energy.
All support can do is tell you why
After several calls, I am disappointed with Apple’s support process.
The advisors follow a script, and in practice they can’t solve anything. What they can do is tell you why your account was flagged, and if there is a misunderstanding, help clear it up. What they can’t do is speed up the review. Even after they have gone through your account and confirmed there is nothing wrong with it, the answer is the same: wait.
So making that call is essentially no different from doing nothing and waiting for the system to finish on its own.
A phone is not something you buy and forget. You keep using the company’s services and paying in its store for years. For a company selling that kind of long-term product to get basic customer service this wrong is hard for me to accept.
Amazon was no better
Around the same time, Amazon also put me under review once, because I had bought Apple gift cards there.
I sent the documents they asked for, quite a lot of them, and they still asked for more. I honestly don’t understand what else could be missing after everything I had already provided.
None of these reviews has been resolved yet.
Consumers stuck inside the service
This made one thing clear to me. Once a big company reaches some degree of monopoly in a market, and users are locked into its service with no alternative that offers the same experience, the company effectively holds a kind of power within its own products and domain.
If what you run into is a systemic problem on its side, pushing back, or even getting it to fix your issue, is extremely hard. Mostly, all you can do is wait.
What I did
Besides waiting, I filed a complaint with the California Attorney General’s office and another with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). We’ll see whether either makes a difference.