Apple Support told me these “decisions are taken in a higher department” and escalated me to tier 2, who insisted: “we’ve determined your account doesn’t meet the conditions to enable it.” Their suggestion was for me to create a new Apple account.

Then, three days later, my account was suddenly re-enabled; and it has worked perfectly ever since, as if nothing happened.

I hadn’t used gift cards in nearly a decade, so my guess (and this is pure speculation) is there must be other flags affecting older accounts.

The whole episode was utterly kafkaesque, and it’s made me much more cautious about relying too heavily on the whims of our private megacorp gatekeepers.