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Comment by javierbyte | Hacker News Reader

I lost one of my accounts last month to something similar to this. I used to have a secondary email as 2FA and then it got changed to "use one of my active devices", honestly I don't remember if there was some popup asking me to confirm the change, but one day I changed my iOS devices and the account was lost for good as I could not "tap confirm".

I tried to contact them from the email that used to be the 2FA, but no one could help me. It was a sad and eye-opening experience as I could have lost google domains and more.

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I was able to contact Google, provide government issued identification and they removed the 2FA on the account.

Took about 3-5 days once I sent in the documents.

How did you do this?

Is the process repeatable?

Depends on a few factors in my experience, but when I had been locked out of an old email for 5 years because I knew the password but didn't own the associated phone number anymore, I had to know when my account was created (month and year), answer the security questions correctly, and know the full phone number associated with the account - and it still required a human review after a few days before I was able to reset the password (and I still had trouble changing the old phone number to my current one but I somehow managed).

The only account for which I could definitely provide this information would be my work email. It’s kinda of ridiculous to make this part of the criteria for resolving potentially huge disruption to a person’s life.

Something similar happened to me last year. Luckily I had a vm with an android emulator with my Google account on it and managed to recover it

After that I activated the 2FA using authenticator... But using Authy, and has worked like a charm

Last time I worked to replace gAuthenticator with Authy for gmail, it failed. Toggling 2FA off and starting fresh didn’t work either. Have any tips?

Go to

www.google.com/signin/recovery

And give it a try instead to recover your account

There is a chance it might work

That resvolves a 404 for me.

Looks like they meant to say https://accounts.google.com/signin/recovery

Yes my bad ,

Thanks a lot !

Same thing here, my 'your other device' was a VM that i had deleted. Telegram did this to me as well and won't send the text message..

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