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Comment by joshmn | Hacker News Reader

If there are any Dropboxers here (drew—I emailed you a few weeks ago, but I imagine you're busy):

I went to prison for 18 months, my digital and physical life was stolen from me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451567 applies to my Dropbox account (and Apple but separate problem); I just received the "your account will be going bye-bye" email. I have very important dead-mom-club stuff in there, and support is useless. :(

Edit: Thanks unofficial Dropbox support channel; thanks Drew :)

Edit edit: Try my luck with my Apple account now, I guess—Tim Cook, you busy?

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Hi Josh -- Drew here -- our escalations team should be reaching out shortly. (Losing phone, 2FA keys, etc. can be tricky but they should be able to work with you and hopefully verify enough to get you unblocked.)

Thanks for helping!

Awesome move to help a simple user in need. hats off.

Well done, Drew!! And congrats on building an amazing company. Hope you'll get some rest before embarking in whatever is next.

Coincidentially, I know the new CEO, Ashraf Alkarmi; we met at AWS when he was launching Appstream, I believe back in 2013 if I'm not mistaken. It's funny to recognize a name. I am hopeful that he will do well as a CEO.

>I went to prison for 18 months, my digital and physical life was stolen from me

This is wild phrasing.

I actually don't think you are commenting about the casualness, but the usage of the term "stole". Correct me if I'm wrong.

I can say I view my own time in jail very transactionally and I have run into many people that don't understand that. They expect a sob story about how you were innocent, or how you turned your life around.

I don't think I'd ever say my life was "stolen" from me, but it definitely feels that way in the moment. Having a bunch of armed people come and throw you in a cage certainly leaves you with a new perspective to process.

sad that going viral on social media is the only functional support system for many tech companies. good luck hope you get your mom's stuff.

I was selling a GPU on Facebook marketplace during covid.

The description was that the card was good for gaming or “turning dinosaurs into clean money”.

Banned permanently and no way to ever reach a human.

I sold a rifle legally on an online auction site. The buyer was offered to pay with PayPal they were given the option to use. The buyer took that option, making me break PayPal TOS.

Banned permanently and no way to ever reach a human.

Banned from Venmo, absolutely no idea why. SO banned from Venmo, absolutely no idea why.

Banned permanently and no way to ever reach a human.

Fuck. Big. Tech.

> Banned from Venmo, absolutely no idea why. SO banned from Venmo, absolutely no idea why.

Prior to 2013 or after? Maybe they merged ban lists with PayPal (who owns them).

It's because Venmo is owned by PayPal

It’s not though.

All three of those events were separated by at least a year each long after PayPal bought Venmo.

even though it was a joke, what you did looked like money laundering.

which probably triggered a SAR

which companies are legally forbidden from disclosing https://www.finra.org/arbitration-mediation/rules-case-resou...

Fair criticism. The tricky part though with any scaled service is that for every legitimate case like this, there are many more bad actors trying to hijack accounts through exactly this mechanism -- so account recovery has to be conservative by default, which means legitimate cases sometimes get caught in the friction. Not an excuse, but it's a hard problem at scale and not just e.g. a cost-cutting thing or not giving a shit.

[flagged]

Seems minorly AI ("Fair criticism.", emdash), but as someone who works adjacent to this space, the rest reads like something I'd write.

It wasn't an em dash though —

It was two hypens --

Not every use of the em dash is Ai. I’ve long used it and always am accused of using Ai in responses — though I never do.

No indicator of AI writing is going to last forever. We really shouldn't over index on the oldest indicator (which is liable to decay first). People are starting to say "delve" more in verbal conversations. This treadmill will keep moving. Unfortunately we have little choice but to keep up with it.

It wasn't even an actual em dash —

It was two hyphens --

This is almost as good as the classic HN "Putnam" comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

(Hint: No, he's not replying with AI. Two hyphens are not an em dash. Even then there's no hint of it being an AI response. Also the person is actually the CEO of Dropbox, the very person this thread is all about. You only have to click his username to see his posting history to see he's not an AI bot posting endlessly, his last posts (prior to today) were in 2024.)

> The tricky part though with any scaled service is that for every legitimate case like this, there are many more bad actors trying to hijack accounts through exactly this mechanism

I really wish more people understood this, especially on HN.

Account recovery flows are flooded with people trying to break into other people's accounts. It's going to be nearly impossible to make a system that can allow someone to recovery their account without also accidentally allowing someone to social engineering their way into someone else's account.

hey drew! fwiw it was actually NOT criticism of dropbox specifically - ive worked at and also run a company where this is the case - but for our smaller scale it is because we have support overwhelm and havent sufficiently figured out our own processes to triage everything well. not casting a stone here. you definitely have way more bad actor problems that mean you cant have nice things.

Oh man, sorry to hear that. I had a secondary Dropbox account I used for a few small but important documents. At some point I somehow lost the 2FA factor, and I don't know how as I've managed to keep the 2FA for every other one of my services across multiple app/os/phone installs.

Anyway, I reached out to their support for help and they were utterly useless. I had a couple weeks of back and forth with them before giving up. I hope I never actually need those docs.

I hope you have a better outcome than I did.

This must be one hell of an edge case - glad to see you are "free" :).

It's the digital equivalent of your house burning down, your devices are inside it, and you never bothered to bring the 2FA codes you definitely wrote down to the bank.

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