In your example, the user was easily able to contact a real human being who informed them that their account had been terminated for using a fraudulent gift card.

That human being even went to bat for the user and tried to convince corporate that buying the fraudulent gift card had been an honest mistake in trusting the wrong seller and not intentional fraud.

This seems like quite a different experience from "you are banned for life and we won't even talk to you or tell you why".

Read on for the salient part.

> This Senior Agent #2 was not as supportive as the first, and gave me information that contradicted Senior Agent #1: “Your account has been permanently disabled,” he said. “There is nothing else you can do, there is no escalation path.”

> When I asked for an explanation as to why, all he would say is, “See the terms and conditions.”

Ultimately, the author was able to get out of that dead-end, but it sounded awfully close.

The salient fact is that the user was easily able to contact customer support, find out exactly what the issue was, provide documentation showing what had happened, and appeal an adverse decision all the way to the top.

This is significantly different than "we won't tell you what the issue is and we won't even accept communications from you".

All this stuff reminds me of an article I read 35 years ago about the dispossessed in the Soviet Union. People whose records had been lost by the system. And so officially to the state they didn't exist. What out that they couldn't get jobs or housing. Their only hope was to appeal to a bureaucrat with enough power to re-instate them.