TL;DR: If your Oracle Cloud Free Tier signup crashes at the payment step on Safari and you end up stuck in "Pending Review" with support telling you they can't help, the cause is likely Safari's Advanced Tracking and Fingerprinting Protection breaking Oracle's fraud detection scripts. Disable it (plus a few related privacy settings), redo the signup with the same email and same card, and it'll go through.

Symptoms

• Signup form crashed silently after entering payment info, before completing remaining steps
• Two small authorization charges appeared on card and reversed normally
• Got the "Your Oracle Cloud Account is Pending Review" email
• Live chat and the customer service web form both said "we cannot help with this"
• Stuck in limbo with no path forward through official channels

What was actually wrong

Safari (macOS Tahoe) was breaking Oracle's payment-step fraud detection scripts. The setting Safari → Settings → Advanced → "Use advanced tracking and fingerprinting protection" set to "in all browsing" interferes with the JavaScript fingerprinting APIs that Oracle's embedded fraud detection (likely Forter or Sift) needs to function. The script errors mid-execution and the page silently breaks at payment.

The "Pending Review" email isn't really a review — it's what happens when your application record is left incomplete on Oracle's side and gets flagged for a human who, in practice, never looks at it.

What worked

Retried the signup with these specific changes:

1. Safari → Settings → Advanced → "Use advanced tracking and fingerprinting protection" → changed from "in all browsing" to "in Private Browsing only"
2. Safari → Settings → Privacy → "Prevent cross-site tracking" → unchecked
3. Safari → Settings → Privacy → "Hide IP address" → set to "Off"
4. iCloud Private Relay → turned off (Apple Account → iCloud → Private Relay)
5. Disabled all Safari extensions for the session
6. Used a regular window, not Private Browsing
7. Verified my real ISP showed on whatismyipaddress.com before starting (should match your actual ISP, not Apple's relay or a proxy)

Other discipline that mattered:

• Typed all card and address info manually — no autofill (autofill can insert invisible characters that fail backend validation)
• Matched billing address to my card statement character-for-character (St vs Street, apartment formatting, postal code spacing all matter)
• Accepted all cookies on Oracle's banner
• Completed the entire flow in one sitting, no backtracking
• Used the same email and same card as my previous failed attempt

Result: signup completed cleanly. "Creating your account" message, then a full provisioning email about 15 minutes later.

Things to know

• Don't switch to Chrome unless you've confirmed it's not proxying your traffic through Google. Some Chrome installations route through Google's IP Protection — check whatismyipaddress.com first. If it shows "Google LLC" as your ISP, Chrome will look worse to Oracle's fraud detection than Safari did.
• Don't sign up again with a different email or card after a failed attempt. Same card + same email + same name signals "same person retrying" to fraud detection. Different anything signals "fraud evasion." Counterintuitive but consistent across multiple user reports.
• "Wait it out" advice for Pending Review doesn't work. If support says they can't help, they really can't. Waiting longer doesn't change anything. Clean re-signup with the technical issues fixed is the only path.
• Restore your privacy settings after signup. Day-to-day Console use doesn't trigger the same fingerprinting requirements as the signup form, so you can re-enable everything once the account is provisioned.

Posting this because I lost a week to this issue and couldn't find a clear writeup connecting Safari's fingerprinting protection to the payment crash. Hope it saves someone else the same week. Happy to answer questions.