To your first point - The natural counterpoint is - there are billions of Google account there. Yet, the number of cases you hear about this is in the handful.

To your second point - scalping phones is most definitely against ToS. This is true for Google, Apple, Smsung anybody.

Here are our ToS - https://store.google.com/intl/en-US_us/about/device-terms.ht...

> You may only purchase Devices for your personal use. You may not commercially resell any Device, but you may give the Device as a gift. Recipients of gifts may need to open and maintain a Google Payments account in order to receive any support offered by Google. These Terms apply to any gift recipient.

This isn't unique to Google. I'd like to see you walk into an Apple store, and buy 10 iPhones. Or say, 100?

In fact - Apple even introduced controls to stop scalping of Genius Bar appointments:

http://www.idownloadblog.com/2013/09/12/apple-store-genius-b...

Or say you create 100 email accounts - john001@gmail.com, john002@gmail.com, john003@gmail.com etc. - and have them each buy a phone, and ship them to a single physical address.

You can see why this would come across as hijacking/botnet fraud, right? (That's separate to the ToS violations).

But from public statements - the scalping itself wasn't what got them, it was probably the bot-net like account creation, and indications of payment fraud.

Thirdly point - it doesn't sound remotely like legalese, and there's no indication lawyers were even involved. In fact, why would they be? I would have preferred him to post some more technical details, as that would have cleared things up, but he posted a nice message of his own volition, which I suppose is fine.

It reads more like the message of somebody who's relieved, and glad he got an explanation of what actually happened behind the scenes.