Title: Hi HN,<p>(Text below is pretty long, forgive me)<p>I'm a long-time user, you may know me on this site, but I'll use this brand new account because I don't want this story to be public yet.<p>I registered an iPhone developer account about a year ago (a company account, with an English Ltd). I started with one small app, made $30 in the first month, then $90, then $700, $1000, $2500, $3000, then $3500.<p>Good income, right? Problem is, I have never seen a penny of it. When I signed up, I made a mistake. I had registered as a company, but I gave my personal bank account. There was a field to enter the account information, it went through a verification process of a few days, and came back alright.<p>At the point I made $2500, I quit my job. Things were looking good. A few days later, Apple wrote me an email saying that they tried to pay me and it did not go through.<p>After a series of emails, it turned out that even though Apple lets you specify the Account holder name, they do not send to that account name! They send to the company name. My bank of course rejected this transfer from Apple.<p>So I tried to make a bank account in England. I could not because I don't live in England! I decided to change the company to a company in my home country, and the bank as well.<p>This process took well over 3 months to do. Apple would take weeks to reply emails, and I had to send a letter to Steve Jobs and some other random high-ups at Apple before some head of department suddenly appeared on the scene, and got the issue resolved in a couple of weeks.<p>At this point, my savings had dried up (yes, I did not have a lot), and I had to borrow money to live. Apple would always say that they were shortly about to resolve the issue, I just had to sign this or that or fax to this number this document. It kept dragging on, till finally, last week on friday, it was over! Company name was changed, bank account was changed.<p>Apple issued me a payment file for $11.000, the amount they are owing me. I checked my bank account several times. Nothing.<p>Then I wrote an email, asking why I had not received the money. They wrote back saying that all income was still associated with the old bank account because it was earned by that account, and that they could not transfer the money to the new account. They had sent the money to the very same account I had started the process with!<p>Now, in spite of earning $450 on saturday, $400 on sunday with my iPhone apps, I am broke and don't even have enough on my bank account to pay my rent.<p>I feel like I'm an ant trying to break down the great wall of china - HN, What can I do? Who can I email to solve this problem for me? Before going public with this, what can I do? How do I make them reconfigure whatever Oracle payment system is preventing them from just transfering the money to the correct account?<p>What steps can I still take here?
Upvote: