Somebody gave me an iTunes gift card as a present. I do download some apps from the iTunes app store. However I only get the free ones. I still activated the gift card and posted the credit to my account. Who knows? Maybe there will be some cool app I need to buy in the future.This is the thing I wondered about. How does the gift card and credit activation work? There is a code on the back of my gift card. It is a 16 character code. The first 15 characters are alphabetic. The last character is a number. You key it into the app store, and it knows the amount of credit to give you.
Surely these numbers by themself do not equate the money. If that were so, I could steal a stack of them from the store and be app store rich. I imagine that when you purchase the card, the cashier scans it in and that activates the value on the card. That would be the smart way to regulate the cards from theft.
But what is that 16 character code? It might be some sort of encrypted value. Or then again it might just be a random set of characters to make my card unique. This will require more thought before I can figure it out. What do you all know about this number? I want to know.
