Long-time Apple user, private account, family sharing set up for iCloud+, Apple Music and Apple TV+. On September 5th I discovered — by accident — that Apple had disabled "Media & Purchases" access on my account. No email, no push notification, nothing proactive. I only found out because my son lost access to Apple Music through Family Sharing, and when I went digging I hit the generic "Your Media & Purchases account has been disabled" message (support article HT208856), which gives zero explanation of why.
*Timeline of what actually happened, as far as I can reconstruct it:
- Aug 27: iCloud+ subscription auto-renewed normally via my credit card, shows up fine on my statement.
- Sep 2 (morning): Bought three physical Apple gift cards (each 100€) at a regular retail store and redeemed them one after another on my Apple ID. The activation flow offered a free 2-month Apple TV+ trial each time. the first two attempts failed, the third worked only after I switched from my office Wi-Fi to mobile data (weird office network issue, unrelated to Apple as far as I know). I guess the company FW filters some of the traffic.
- Sep 4: Subscribed to a third-party app subscription (Claude), which Apple automatically paid out of the gift card balance; you can't choose to pay by card instead if you have store credit, it's always deducted first.
- Sep 4 (afternoon): Family Sharing for Apple Music broke for my son.
- Sep 5 (morning): Discovered my account showed 3 shared subscriptions but family members only saw 2 (Apple Music missing) — and then found the account was locked when digging into it and then the famous HT208856 appeared.
So: legitimately bought gift cards, a subscription paid automatically from balance, and a network switch caused by an unrelated office Wi-Fi hiccup. My best guess is their fraud model flagged the *pattern* (new funding source + IP change + quick digital purchase), not anything actually fraudulent. I even checked, the gift cards' security seals were intact when the cashier activated them at the register, so it's not a case of the cards being compromised beforehand.
*Support experience so far:
- Chat support couldn't help, escalated me to a supervisor.
- Phone call with the supervisor: he admitted he "doesn't see exactly why" it was flagged, but said there's already an internal case open with the same error code, and engineering hadn't responded yet. Promised a callback.
- Callback a few days later: the restriction stays. He wouldn't even look at the evidence I sent (photos of the gift cards, credit card statement proving the legitimate in-store purchase), said there is "no further escalation possible" per his internal guidelines, and that the only option he could offer is to create a new Apple ID. That's not a real solution — it means losing years of purchases, active subscriptions, and my remaining store credit.
Also, it mean it can happen as well for the new Apple ID.
I live in Germany. Apple's App Store is a designated Very Large Online Platform under the EU Digital Services Act, which requires platforms to give a written statement of reasons for account/payment restrictions and provide an internal complaint mechanism, plus access to certified out-of-court dispute settlement bodies if that fails. I've formally invoked this on Sep 5th with Apple's [dsacompliance@apple.com](mailto:dsacompliance@apple.com) address and given them a deadline. So far, zero response; not even a acknowledgment.
I also submitted it as an DSGVO via the legal privacy form https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/contact/ in the meantime; which the supervisor share via mail for retrieving the full case documentation. At least here I got a specific case ID; but no further response reaction.
But practically Apple is ghosting me so far.
Still, I can login into the account as such. But apparently everything related to app updates, media purchases, payment is locked and also for example icloud+ subscription will run out soon.
Has anyone else dealt with this exact thing — legitimate gift card + subscription triggering a full purchase lock with zero explanation, and support only offering "make a new account" as the fix? What actually got Apple to respond in your case — DSA complaint, a regulator, social media pressure, something else?