Australian Consumer Watchdog Performs Sting Operation on Apple

An Australian Consumer Watchdog carried out a sting operation on tech company Apple recently relating to the company’s “error 53” iPhone bug, to demonstrate that the company was not acting in accordance with Australian consumer protection laws.

The Guardian reports that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) carried out a sting operation on Tech giant Apple, catching staff purposefully misleading iPhone customers about their legal rights relating to free repairs and replacements for iPhones suffering from the “error 53” bug which is connected to the phone’s Touch ID feature.

A court case was filed against Apple last year by Australian authorities after multiple iPhone and iPad customers were affected by a bug relating to the devices fingerprint Touch ID that rendered the devices unusable if it was detected that the phone had been repaired by a third party technician. The case, which was set to go to trial in December, claimed that Apple wrongly told customers that they were not entitled to repairs or replacements if they had used a third-party repair shop.

However, court documents obtained by the Guardian reportedly show that Apple has denied the claims brought against them by the ACCC. The document also shows that the ACCC went undercover to investigate the company, contacting all 13 Apple retailers across Australia in June of last year. The ACCC claimed that Apple’s response to questions relating to Error 53 was the same across all 13 stores.

“In each call, Apple Australia represented to the ACCC caller that no Apple entity … was required to, or would, remedy the defective speaker at no cost under the [Australian consumer law] if the screen of the iPhone had been replaced by someone other than Apple Australia or an Apple-authorised service provider,” the ACCC’s court claim states.

The ACCC also claimed that Apple’s website purposefully misleads customers in a similar manner stating,  “If the screen or any other part on your iPhone or iPad was replaced somewhere else, contact Apple Support about pricing information for out-of-warranty repairs.”

Apple claims that the undercover calls made by the ACCC cannot be considered as breaches of consumer law as the law does not exist in “hypothetical circumstances.” Apple claims that real customers that called the store would have received other information that would have informed them of their consumer rights relating to Apple products.

Apple claimed that they had attempted to rectify Error 53 issues by developing an outreach program that offered replacements and repairs for the many phones affected by the bug cited in the ACCC’s case. An IOS update was also released in February to rectify the error and restore phone functionality to devices affected by the bug. Apple faced similar cases relating to the error in the United States, but those were thrown out of court.