Comment by TrackerFF
16 hours ago
Nothing new. 10 years ago my (now 20+ year) google account was compromised for a whole 5 minutes. It was used by shady bots, and instantly banned. No warnings, no nothing. Trying to figure out what had happened was a challenge in itself.
Getting through to customer support was impossible.
5 years later I tried to get my account opened up, filled out some forms, and by some miracle it was.
My biggest takeaway from this (other than enabling 2FA) was that it is probably easier to get ahold of the scammers that control your account, than to get ahold of actual human customer support at google / alphabet.
Google will happily screw over users with 2FA as well. A few years ago I was out of state for the funeral of someone very close to me. I lost my phone and then needed to get into my email urgently. I didn't have my computer or any other devices with me and no way to get to them. Fortunately I had actually planned ahead for something like this and added my partners phone number as a 2FA method. So I tried to login with that and Google refused!
Google said that because I had more secure 2FA methods configured it wouldn't allow my to use one of the methods that I had very intentionally configured for exactly this scenario. My opinion of the company was already pretty low but I was still shocked that they would simply discard my security settings without any warning or override option. They made one of the worst trips of my life even more miserable. Google hates their own users so much.