There’s an easier tell. It’s impossible because you can’t to get Google to help you at all about any account issues, never mind them being as proactive as to call you.
In other words if Google call you, it’s not Google.
It’s slightly depressing that there are probably more fake Google support staff than real ones.
Then those numbers should simply play a message that this is the only official phone number, and no human will ever call from or answer this number, and the company does not offer customer support or appeals to account problems.
They also need to make searching for fraud phone numbers return anti-fraud messaging rather than what it currently does. Seems like the entire 844-906 exchange is fraudulent [1].
I had a family member that just got scammed because they panicked after their Facebook account got banned, basically exactly like [2].
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=844-906
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/01/31/51...
It's not where the _would_ rank ... it's where they currently _do_ rank.
In my test, the AI Overview produced accurate information ("Google does not offer phone support for account recovery") but none of the other hits on the first page say anything like "Phone support calls are always fraud. Google will not call you."
If you or any person figured out how to do such a thing you’d be the next trillion $ company.
At least in the US Attorneys General are being forced to do this work for them. It's essentially the only way to get a hacked Facebook/Instagram account recovered.
https://www.engadget.com/41-state-attorneys-general-tell-met...
They’ll make noise about this because it riles a loud minority. If they really wanted it fixed then pass laws. They don’t, because they also like business.
They are making 10+$/month per user for a few hundred million, and have a large profit margin that easily pays for basic tech support.
India requires direct customer support by law.
They provide support in India to meet local laws.
Big tech loves "stripping unnecessary fluff" and "being efficient". Turns out the "unnecessary" stuff is there for a reason. The automatic management + zero customer support is dystopian to say the least.
Saying nonsense to basic arithmetic is ignorant.
Don’t like the service, don’t use it. Same as every company.
AT&T has 100M customers, 40k customer service reps, avg wage $20/hr full time, i.e., $40k/year each.
If you simply scale this 5B customers would need 2M customer service reps. That’s $80B in wages. With no legal need, and since people use their services more by choice more than just about any other company’s product on the planet, it would seem they’re doing just fine.
1-1-GOO: “Google never contacts customers directly and has no way to let customers contact them. Hace a nice day”
At that point I'd set up an LLM agent to reply for me. Big Tech are no longer the only ones who can pretend to be a human.
The greatest mystery of my life is what is a "Google Product Expert" on their community forums whom I assume:
1. isn't an employee speaking as the company.
2. is someone given the title by the company.
3. spends a lot of time answering questions despite not being paid for it.
4. can contact Google employees somehow.
The only perks for this that Google lists is that you can join a secret club of Google Product Experts. It feels like gig economy applied to customer support.
so frustrating
https://support.apple.com/contact
They will even remote into your device and walk you through how to do something.
Years ago, my brother used to work for XBox Live Tech Support, and he said that easily over half the calls he got were for things that customers could easily self-service, like a password reset. Many tech issues were fixed by the most basic troubleshooting step: Power cycling.
Meanwhile, my uncle works XFinity tech support, and he'll frequently get calls when a website has an outage, not to mention how many non-technical people think any internet-related issue, such as a forgotten Google password, means calling your ISP.
This doesn't even begin to talk about bad actors calling tech support to try to break into someone else's account. Google accounts are high-value targets. Once you've gotten in, there's a really good chance you could easily pivot to all of that person's other accounts.
To handle the call volume that a service like Google would have, if they offered phone tech support, the amount of staff they would need would be in the hundreds of thousands, and so many of the calls they take would be wastes of time. There are a lot of non-technical people that have no idea how things work and basically think that Google IS the Internet.
Why not charge for support?
You bet your ass I would pay a support fee if my Gmail account was having issues.
$19.95 per incident to talk to someone who could ACTUALLY resolve an issue would be totally worth it, especially for people who suddenly find themselves locked out for no known reason. A fee would also filter out most the silly calls, and if not, and they can resolve a password reset in 2 minutes, it is way worth it for both the caller and Google.
They do. And when you actually pay for support, they answer the phone. At least in my experiences.
The only times they've left me high and dry is when I didn't have any actual paid support contract or subscription for whatever the question was about.
They have a Gmail support contract. You signing up?
I did used to have a Google workspace account, for several years, but administering it was a lot more work than just having a Gmail account. It's certainly not something that my mom could do.
I'm talking about something more oriented toward consumers, and ideally pay-per-use.
> As a Google One member, you can reach out to Google One support for help via chat, a phone call or email.
https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9003266?hl=en_DE...
I talked to a human Apple support person once and we had quite a long chat but ultimately his conclusion was basically "I can't know anything you don't already know and there's no way to resolve the problem."
I clicked support and was able to get a call right away. But I pay $20/year for Google One.
The support is excellent. I can get a human on a live chat and request a screenshare and phone call session with a few clicks in under 10 minutes.
But of course that’s only available to me because I pay for the business version of Google albeit for personal use.
Also, you don’t pay for Google. It’s a free search engine and a free email service. You get tech support if you pay for the enterprise workspace features.
Your snark should be directed towards legislators, not commenters on HN.
So it's very possible to phone Google support, just don't believe anyone who calls you.
Paying Google apps / GSuite users can call a number and it's real humans answering (and they're very helpful).
But indeed I don't think they proactively call you.
I've never thought of it that way but you're right! Dealing with support at most tech companies is a horrible experience and is usually something I research before using a product where a failure in service provision could lead to catastrophic results.