Suppose you provided a valid credit card to send a gift to a relative — can you think of a company that won’t take the business? I can, now: it’s Apple, through its iTunes store. I was trying to send my niece an iTunes gift certificate as a get-well gift. (She had her tonsils out and was at the hospital.) She’s an iTunes fan and if the gift could have arrived by email, she could have shopped for music right there. It turns out that new customers can’t send gift certificates at iTunes, and there’s no way to get around it. A very helpful Apple rep named Christina walked me through several possible workarounds, but nothing worked.
I’m sure Apple has security problems with iTunes. The fraud possibilities are endless. Still, it seems there should be a way around all this.
