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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

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ehsankia

> registered for years

Right, that's likely the "bug" part. On HN of all places, people shouldn't be surprised that bugs happen.

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Unfortunately due to a lack of customer support posting here gives me the best chance of getting it fixed!

If google had working support flows I would not have written this up or posted here about it.

A few years back I lost access to a different google account as the recovery phone number was a landline and google was trying to send SMS messsages to it. I had the right password but it thought I was suspicious and insisted on SMS verification. I never managed to reach a human to get something done about the issue.

> Unfortunately due to a lack of customer support posting here gives me the best chance of getting it fixed! > If google had working support flows I would not have written this up or posted here about it.

They do, you just have to pay for that privilege via Google One.

If you are locked out you can't access Google One's support.

My understanding is that you can always call them, even if your account is blocked.

I don't have it but it looks like you have to initiate the call from the Google One page and they call you, they don't have an inbound number.

Googling "google one phone number" did show me a potential scam result in the infobox at "gooogle-live-personn" on google sites that obviously isn't official. You can't make this stuff up.

Went ahead and escalated this one internally. That's pretty bad.

That page is weirdly interesting to me. It's hosted on sites.google.com which was probably one of the worst ideas google ever had, security wise (yes mom, always make sure the page says Google.com - but not sites.google.com). It's clearly one of those blog spam page types, with the same 3 bits of information repeated over and over again. It does not have any clear phishing links, in fact it tells you to open support.google.com in your browser without a link. One of the number it links it's the official adwords support number (https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7218750).

Only after all of this it links to another number, which from what I can tell is a scam phone center which will offer to help you with your account for some money. I really wonder if they're betting on everything else being so hopeless that a person will eventually try to call this other number after trying all the other options before.

It does tell you something about Google support if scammers can do that...

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