Comment by treesknees
5 years ago
The worst was when I contacted Google Fi about my Nexus 5x bootlooping, where they wouldn't help me at all until I gave them the verification code from my Fi account. Normally that would be easy, but being on the road with my phone dead was...challenging... and support did not once attempt to show any compassion or willingness to work with me to figure it out.
I've also had a case where my Google-owned phone running Google's OS on Google's phone network wouldn't download my eSim, and it fell outside the Google support script, so they couldn't help me.
I learned two things, one was always have your 2FA backup codes handy, and the other was that Google support is not helpful. I'm no longer a Fi customer and have been slowly pulling all of my subscriptions from them.
I'm sorry for your difficulties, but this is exactly the kind of situations social engineering is made of. You can't blame them for not overriding the script out of compassion or empathy, otherwise some random person with a good story could take ownership of Google accounts.
Ordering a replacement phone be sent to the account owner certainly isn't within the scope of social engineering. The fact that I couldn't do _anything_ to verify ownership outside of having access to the code from my Google account seems excessive for device replacement.