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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

This is silly.

If they pay for Google Fi and Google Fiber then obviously they can contact customer support. There's a phone number and everything.

The account was probably an error in fraud/spam detection. Yes it sucks but just call Google, man. C'mon.

In this particular case, "help me get this seen by someone at Google" and "I've resigned myself that the account is likely gone forever" is just attention-seeking.

I'm sure an account rep will escalate it and the account will be restored. It's not like Google goes and instantly deletes all the data with someone's account with they flag it for suspected fraud/spam.

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> I'm sure an account rep will escalate it and the account will be restored. It's not like Google goes and deletes all the data with someone's account with they disable it for suspected fraud/spam.

If you left your comment here, it would have been typical HN sarcastic snark.

You are talking about a company infamous for its lack of customer support and, when you do get a human on the phone, infamous for the "sry, computer says no" dead end, so beware of extrapolating from what I assume are your positive experiences.

You mention Google Fi/Fiber in your mistake of thinking that if you can get anyone on the phone, then they can help you with your lateral issue in another system, but this is exactly the frustration with contacting Google.

I've had my account disabled without notice for supposed issues with Adsense, Adwords, Gmail, and Gcloud over the last 15 years, and your optimism would almost be endearing if it weren't so cocksure. Get burned a few times and you join the ranks of us who have learned to use different Google accounts for everything, breaking another Google ToS.

They often have at least email support for services that you pay for.

...but the service most likely to be broken in an impactful way with Google is email.

Google's changed a lot in the past 15 years. Every Google One account comes with customer service now. Nobody's saying it's perfect but the old "there's literally no way to contact Google or have them do anything" just isn't true anymore, and hasn't been for a while.

It sucks you had some bad experiences, but your snark towards me is uncalled for. Google service reps can escalate to address what you call "lateral" issues.

But none of this matters, because in this particular case the user hasn't even tried contacting Google. Maybe because if they did, there would be nothing to tweet about.

Did you have positive experience with google support yourself or do you work at google? Never heard of any positive customer support experience with google.

As I said in another comment, just normal customer service experiences. Nothing amazing but nothing terrible either.

You've probably never heard of a positive experience with them because people rarely write on a forum about a normal boring customer service interaction. People only talk about it when it goes terribly wrong.

> Every Google One account comes with customer service now.

Yes, but to get support, you have to log into your account which you can't do if they have suspended it.

> If they pay for Google Fi and Google Fiber then obviously they can contact customer support. There's a phone number and everything.

Hahahaha that's a funny take. I'm going to guess that you've never had the misfortune of needing to contact Google for support of their products.

I have contacted Google multiple times for different products, and it's been fine. No misfortune involved. Nothing amazing but nothing terrible either. Just standard customer support, you know?

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.

If you give them money, you get better support than j. random user.

I have Google One and get support just fine from them.

Yeah, I always think this when this stuff gets posted here and people go "oh my god, I *wish" I could pay Google for support".

You can, it's not very expensive and you get a phone number you can call if there's any issues. The times I've needed it for problems like this, they always were able to help. But hating on Google brings karma, I guess.

Not on purpose at least.

In early evolution of Drive when I was using Google for backups with their client, which was called something else that I’ve forgotten, one day when I tried to delete or overwrite something, it corrupted all of the data and it was lost. I was glad I had a different backup, and I’ve been spoiled since then by Drive because it’s not failed in past years.

Keeping another backup offline is critical.

>Keeping another backup offline is critical.

It boggles my mind that people have to even be told this. Keeping your only copies of anything on anyones service is a bad idea.

Convenient - but a HORRIBLE idea. You would think the 90's photo sharing site fiascos would have driven this home but I guess many have short memories?

A surprising number of people who are adults now were still children in the '90s.

>If they pay for Google Fi and Google Fiber then obviously they can contact customer support. There's a phone number and everything.

Assuming the issue you are having isn't stopping you from using Google Fiber and Google Fi as well. Otherwise you couldn't use your phone or internet.

This is one of the reasons you should be diversifying your providers, but there still is a possibility you couldn't easily contact Google.

There are people who make their living off of YouTube who have a rep who can't get answers about why their channel was banned. I'm not sure GoogleFibre support can do much more than send you a new router or knock a few dollars off your next bill...

On Reddit he commented that he has a paid Google One account for work and contacted their support but they “couldn’t” help him either.

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