Breakage is between 10-20% on average, which is just insane.

However, a significant amount of the spending in gift card promotions is from the marketing budget of these companies. They use gift cards to keep you "engaged". They are used the way companies used to give out coupons basically.

Promotions rarely cost much. Keep in mind that even if breakage was zero, every dollar you spend at a company already has a profit margin baked in. Even if you only pay $9 for that $10 of spend at CompanyPlace, they are likely still making a profit. Promotions also have strong limits, so you can't really profit off of them as a consumer.

Except for one time. Once, IKEA ran a promotion that was "Spend $1000, get $100", and chose to set NO LIMITS. People were banking $10k worth of IKEA giftcards "for my future kitchen renovation" and IKEA found out their gift card fulfillment process was.... antiquated. Did you know old versions of Excel only allow for 65k rows of data?

>As for the fraud risk... do they even care?

We care. The brick and mortar store and Apple themselves don't really care, because they pay our company to take that risk, and our entire business is about preventing credit card fraud to reduce how much that risk costs.

>It would be so easy to make gift cards more secure. Modern technology can do a lot better than an alphanumeric code under a sticky cover.

What? What is your idea for better securing these cards? What "Tech" would help?

Note that I have no clue what apple is doing banning this account. We don't tend to ban victims of fraud or crime or scams, especially not for physical cards bought in a store because who knows what actually happened.