Comment by vel0city
4 months ago
I had these people call me the other day. I got a text message alerting me of a potential Google account security issue they had blocked and they I should expect a call. I also got one of those emails and an automated phone call. The automated phone call had me dial 1 if I wanted a call back from support to help recover my account.
I got a call from a very professional sounding woman assuring me she was with Google and they had discovered some potentially fraudulent activity with my Google account in Frankfurt. They said they had locked down my account to protect it but they would walk me through recovering it.
I knew this was impossible, because the Google account in question doesn't have passwords. It has a couple of passkeys which are all physical hardware tokens in my home. But I wanted to see how pushy they would get.
Turned into a half hour phone call with me playing dumb (was watching my kid's sports practice, nothing to do for a half hour but cheer him on). Eventually when I was done with it I let them know I was in the process of filing the report with the federal cybercrime department. Immediately hung up from that.
> I knew this was impossible, because…
There’s an easier tell. It’s impossible because you can’t to get Google to help you at all about any account issues, never mind them being as proactive as to call you.
In other words if Google call you, it’s not Google.
It’s slightly depressing that there are probably more fake Google support staff than real ones.
I feel Google, Facebook, etc. all need to setup actual phone numbers and chat rooms, and make them rank highly on searches for "Google support phone number", "Google fraud department", "Google account recovery department", "Google Live Support Chat" etc.
Then those numbers should simply play a message that this is the only official phone number, and no human will ever call from or answer this number, and the company does not offer customer support or appeals to account problems.
They also need to make searching for fraud phone numbers return anti-fraud messaging rather than what it currently does. Seems like the entire 844-906 exchange is fraudulent [1].
I had a family member that just got scammed because they panicked after their Facebook account got banned, basically exactly like [2].
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=844-906
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/01/31/51...
“If you receive a calling from Google, ask them for your issue ID, hung up and call 1-1-GOO”
1-1-GOO: “Google never contacts customers directly and has no way to let customers contact them. Hace a nice day”
Or, hear me out: provide actual customer support.
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"We’re the search company. We don’t care ; we don’t have to".
Where do you think Google would rank its own support, help, etc., contact pages and info if not at the top of searches like the ones you mentioned?
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In case you would like a concrete example to ground the cynicism about corporate trade offs around customer support, I recommend watching Jill Bearup's 10 minute video [0] about this week's demonetization. For example, she has to deal with some form that she "can't submit", a customer service contact 12 time zones away (so email replies are 12 hours delayed), and an account manager who is non-responsive. In her court, are some unaffiliated google employees giving guidance, but only because they were already part of her youtube watching audience.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RZHajVV9PA
> For example, she has to deal with some form that she "can't submit", a customer service contact 12 time zones away (so email replies are 12 hours delayed),
At that point I'd set up an LLM agent to reply for me. Big Tech are no longer the only ones who can pretend to be a human.
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If it weren't for the routine ex-Googler postmortem blog post shared on HN I'd think Google doesn't even have human employees.
The greatest mystery of my life is what is a "Google Product Expert" on their community forums whom I assume:
1. isn't an employee speaking as the company.
2. is someone given the title by the company.
3. spends a lot of time answering questions despite not being paid for it.
4. can contact Google employees somehow.
The only perks for this that Google lists is that you can join a secret club of Google Product Experts. It feels like gig economy applied to customer support.
several huge companies do this. here's one
https://discussions.apple.com
so frustrating
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I had Google call me once :) It was when I was riding in a Waymo and one of the screens in the vehicle was lagging a little bit. They made the surprising choice of calling my phone, rather than ringing the car itself, and I didn't pick up because... who picks up when your phone says, "Call from Google" :) They called the car shortly afterward to reassure me that the lagging screen wasn't an indicator that the car would underperform.
Being guaranteed to be able to talk to a human would be great, but I just don't see how it can possibly scale to over 1 billion users that aren't paying like gmail has.
Years ago, my brother used to work for XBox Live Tech Support, and he said that easily over half the calls he got were for things that customers could easily self-service, like a password reset. Many tech issues were fixed by the most basic troubleshooting step: Power cycling.
Meanwhile, my uncle works XFinity tech support, and he'll frequently get calls when a website has an outage, not to mention how many non-technical people think any internet-related issue, such as a forgotten Google password, means calling your ISP.
This doesn't even begin to talk about bad actors calling tech support to try to break into someone else's account. Google accounts are high-value targets. Once you've gotten in, there's a really good chance you could easily pivot to all of that person's other accounts.
To handle the call volume that a service like Google would have, if they offered phone tech support, the amount of staff they would need would be in the hundreds of thousands, and so many of the calls they take would be wastes of time. There are a lot of non-technical people that have no idea how things work and basically think that Google IS the Internet.
> but I just don't see how it can possibly scale to over 1 billion users that aren't paying like gmail has.
Why not charge for support?
You bet your ass I would pay a support fee if my Gmail account was having issues.
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What can a human do that the automated processes for account recovery/etc. can't?
I talked to a human Apple support person once and we had quite a long chat but ultimately his conclusion was basically "I can't know anything you don't already know and there's no way to resolve the problem."
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I had a weird security alert on my Google account the other night after trying to do a "Sign in with Google" to a service I've used for years. Trying to view my account/security info kept redirecting me to a page instructing me on how to clear cookies.
I clicked support and was able to get a call right away. But I pay $20/year for Google One.
They will reach put to try and help sell you more ad spend. If that was a scam its very good cause they set up my adwords campaign for me.
I have a similar anecdote which isn't very relevant except it felt like googlers now care about how they can help make google more money. I would have never expected engineers at Google to care about how to make more money for google like doesn't the money just flow in...
Somehow Google and other tech companies are not required to have a customer service that actually solves the legitimate problems customers have with their services. I wonder how they are allowed to do this not just in the US but across the world.
I pay for Google Workspace for my personal Gmail account. It’s billed per user (with no minimums) so it’s actually very cheap even for the “enterprise” version.
The support is excellent. I can get a human on a live chat and request a screenshare and phone call session with a few clicks in under 10 minutes.
But of course that’s only available to me because I pay for the business version of Google albeit for personal use.
Software is not considered a “product”, so it doesn’t come with the government protections against companies that sell defective or dangerous products.
Also, you don’t pay for Google. It’s a free search engine and a free email service. You get tech support if you pay for the enterprise workspace features.
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I got one of the same calls (didn't believe them). Afterwards I phoned Google support and they said the same thing, they will never call you. I had them confirm nothing was wrong with my account, just in case.
So it's very possible to phone Google support, just don't believe anyone who calls you.
> There’s an easier tell. It’s impossible because you can’t to get Google to help you at all about any account issues, ...
Paying Google apps / GSuite users can call a number and it's real humans answering (and they're very helpful).
But indeed I don't think they proactively call you.
Unless their salespeople are calling you
> It’s slightly depressing that there are probably more fake Google support staff than real ones.
I've never thought of it that way but you're right! Dealing with support at most tech companies is a horrible experience and is usually something I research before using a product where a failure in service provision could lead to catastrophic results.
I had a legit call come from Google Maps and I called them a scammer and various other names.
Right? "Google support" calling is an obvious tell.
> I got a call from a very professional sounding woman
That's usually the tell, right there.
Legit support operations tend to sound unprofessional as hell. Heavy accents, scratchy lines, scripts referencing the wrong OS, etc.
Depends heavily on the company. Fidelity, for example, has super friendly, local sounding support employees. They will sometimes call you directly, too, for things like "checking in on your retirement goals". If someone called sounding professional, it would not be a tell that it isn't actually fidelity.
Plus, most of the weird "customer support" scams I've gotten in the past are people with thick accents on a garbage connection.
> They will sometimes call you directly, too, for things like "checking in on your retirement goals". If someone called sounding professional, it would not be a tell that it isn't actually fidelity.
Sounds like although they might not be 100% scammer, you can be assured it's marketing and not customer support.
Yeah, it was a joke.
However, these scammers tend to come across as the platonic ideal of a perfect support rep.
My wife almost got taken by one, several years ago.
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I've gotten real support calls where the audio was so bad it was hard to understand anything they said. And/Or the standby music fidelity was so awful it's like pounding a spike in my ears. (Or maybe that's intentional so I hang up and don't bother with them.)
You'd think they'd have equipment newer than the 1960's.
Yeah, hah, it is funny that "Google offering phone support" is so unthinkable to me that it's a red flag for a scam.
Yeah, that was also another big red flag for me.
I do have paid services on other Google accounts and have dealt with their support before, but the account they were trying to break into was an ancient one I made as a teenager and don't use for much of anything anymore. If Google Support were to call me about anything (unfathomably unlikely, and never about a security issue like this), it wouldn't be from a free account that has never given Google a dime.
I have received calls from Google associates before. Almost always some account manager looking to find yet another product to sell me. Never proactively to any kind of account issue.
I get lots of helpful emails from my mail administrator telling me I have some sort of problem I need to log in/revalidate/release pending messages etc.
Urgently!
(I run my own mail server and I am the admin)
Sounds as urgent as legit :)
> I got a call from a very professional sounding woman assuring me she was with Google
A customer support person from google? Scamers really tell the craziest stories.
You should have recorded the whole thing
Frankfurt of all places!
Frankfurt is actually notorious in Germany for their issues with drugs. Going outta the train station you can see ppl passed out with literal needles in their arms, taking a shit in public view etc
Doesn't really transfer to cyber crime, but it's definitely one of the more "criminal" places in Germany. Still super tame compared to actual slums etc though
Notorious on social media perhaps. I am yet to see someone in Frankfurt passed out with a needle in their arm. I've been to Frankfurt several times in the last years -- slept once in a hotel near the train station, spent a couple hours until 2-3am at and around the train station because of a missed train, spent a lot of time waiting for my next train connection etc.
The last time I was in Frankfurt was maybe 20 years ago. I suppose things have declined quite a bit since then.
They called from Bahnhof Viertel ;)
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