13 ms·

G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck

465 points by HelloThur 6y ago

I know my password for google suite admin (paid), but they have locked me out due to a suspicious login. Google have locked me out with the following message: "We detected an unusual sign-in attempt. To make sure that someone else isn't trying to access your account, your organization needs you to sign in using your corporate mobile device (the phone or tablet you normally use to access your corporate account). If you don’t have your corporate mobile device with you right now, try again later when you have your corporate mobile device with you. If you continue to have problems signing in, contact your administrator. Learn more Go back & use your corporate mobile device" I am unable to get back in: * Google support doesn't work if you are logged out * I have no primary mobile or corporate device to complete the above step on. What does Google expect customers to do here?

adoxyz 6y ago
Similar issue if you cancel your GSuite account. I cancelled my account and was still billed for it, but now there's no way to contact support since I don't have an active billing account.
- g42gregory 6y ago
  I was debating whether to purchase extra storage for Google Apps email as I am getting close to the 15GB free limit. I decided that I would pay Fastmail instead. I would not want to make my life/business dependent on Google’s whims.
  - drewg123 6y ago
    I have heard horror stories about declined credit card payments for things like extra storage or premium YouTube causing people to be locked out of their accounts with no recourse. Due to this, I am afraid to pay Google in case things go wrong, so I use competing services instead.
    - thisisnico 6y ago
      This is why I refuse to use google for most services. Support is absolute garbage.
  - nvr219 6y ago
    I'm such a fastmail cheerleader that I feel like they should comp my account. But I love them.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    I was debating whether to purchase extra storage for Google Apps email as I am getting close to the 15GB free limit. I decided that I would pay Fastmail instead. Then you're in luck, because Fastmail's $5/month option has twice as much storage as you're using: $30GB.
- heavymark 6y ago
  If you cancelled your account and you were still being charged, did you reach out to your credit card company to let them know about the fradulent charges? They should be able to block billing on their end, once they contacted google's billing to verify you cancelled your account.
  - adoxyz 6y ago
    I wanted to speak to Google Support first and figure it out and make sure I wasn't misunderstanding the charge, but alas I could not contact support without a billing account active, so yes will be contacting my CC company.
  - jandrese 6y ago
    Yeah, this seems like the obvious next step. No need to worry about ruining your account's standing if you've already closed it, and the chargeback should hopefully alert someone at Google to look into your status. Just don't try to use that card number to sign up for any other Google product. On the other hand, that charge might just be the outstanding balance when you cancelled, so it might be legit.
    - adoxyz 6y ago
      Yeah that's what's really annoying, I can't contact support to figure out if the charge is legit or not. So I can either eat the cost or file a charge back and potentially deal with a bigger fallout on my other accounts that I have with Google. It's a shitty situation either way.
  - rckoepke 6y ago
    I'd consider this an absolute method of last resort for any of the large integrated providers like Amazon/Google/etc. There are reports where people have done seemingly legitimate chargebacks and while they get their money back, they also get all their myriad accounts closed that are associated with Amazon and new accounts made with work emails/etc also get closed. Chargebacks seem to be appropriate when you truly no longer want to do any future business at all with a particular company - it might not be limited to just "G suite" or "GCP", or "AWS" or "Amazon", but the whole conglomeration. Obviously YMMV, I'm sure people have had divergent experiences with this. I've always personally been able to get things resolved eventually through chat/email/phone, but I trust that not everyone has the same luck I do.
- BrandoElFollito 6y ago
  Where in the world are you to have banks which promote fraud? In my country (France) you can call your bank, declare that a fraud is going on and it then becomes their problem. They will usually issue you a new card and call it a day.
  - adoxyz 6y ago
    I can call my CC company and declare fraud and get the money back and a new card, but then I'd have to update all other accounts that use that specific CC and it's a shitty experience. Being able to at least email google support would resolve this.
    - BrandoElFollito 6y ago
      Yes, you are of course right. This is a pain in the ass. I was referring to the fact that you are being defrauded, which I understood as "being defrauded and loosing money". I use GSuite since 2004 and the more I read about support the more scared I am. Good luck.
    - oauea 6y ago
      Also you will likely never be able to do business with Google again. So make sure you're willing to never use another paid Google service again.
  - jasonv 6y ago
    Not necessarily true for this case. I had a problem with a [very well known US-based bank] credit card where a re-curring monthly charge that I wanted stopped.. wouldn't be stopped by the bank because I had authorized the recurring charge at the outset. Bank told me to contact the entity charging me, and when I said I couldn't reach them (which was true) and they didn't respond via their support channels, bank said I was SOL. When I said I no longer authorized these charges, bank said I was SOL. For a $10/monthly recurring charge, the bank wouldn't help me. So I used the same call to close all my bank accounts & credit card and moved my savings account funds to another bank account. Bank still wouldn't do anything about that recurring charge.
amrktrack 6y ago
does the account have 2FA?
- jandrese 6y ago
  He said he set up 2FA and then lost the "corporate device" providing it. This is why you always set up backup codes. The 2FA is doing its job here keeping the account safe from someone who doesn't have the token, which unfortunately is the account holder.
  - HelloThur 6y ago
    Wow, didn't expect this post to blow up like this. For reference, I have no 2FA, nor did I lose my corporate device. I've always accessed it through a web browser, never through a mobile, therefore when it asks me to verify with my corporate mobile device, I do not know what device it is referring to.
    - jandrese 6y ago
      Which device did you use when Google first asked you to verify your phone number? Your personal cell phone maybe?
      - techntoke 6y ago
        They don't remember, which is probably how they got themselves into this mess, which everyone else uses as an opportunity to share their Google hate and call for regulation.
      - jlokier 6y ago
        Assuming it was their phone number. What options do they have now, if they abruptly stopped using that phone number for some reason 10 years ago and had no realistic way to know which 275 utilities were hitched to the number (or even if they did, couldn't contact support for reasons described in the article), for example: - because they couldn't afford to pay the bills for a while - or moved country - or changed contract and then found they couldn't port the number (happened to me) and lost the old number - or someone took their phone and they were unable in practice to recover the number or continue using it - or they were ill in hospital for long enough their phone contract expired and they could not have dealt with transfer issues at the time
52-6F-62 6y ago
I've had similar issues with lost/forgotten passwords. I actually have a bricked Nexus device because of it. Any password reclamation attempts are supposed to send an email to my backup account for resolution but the email just never arrives. From my reading it sounds like a common problem as well. And yet I have a newer GSuite email through work and a personal Gmail account for about 14 years (since beta) and no issues otherwise. Also at a loss.
saalweachter 6y ago
Does https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/5024607?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/5024607?hl=en help you? Reading that comment thread makes it look like (a) "primary mobile or corporate device" just means "the last device you signed in on", not like a special device, and (b) maybe it's a problem when you don't have two-factor authentication enabled?
zxcvbn4038 6y ago
This is the part where you have to launch a campaign to shame Google on social media or know someone on the inside to get your situation resolved. When you do get back in my advice is to enable multiple 2FA factors as that seems to streamline the account recovery case.
- thisisnico 6y ago
  I've had the exact same issue with Amazon. I had prime. Suspected suspicious activity. It's been 6 months without resolution. I just created another account but I've been calling in every day since. There is no escalation, I keep getting told the same thing: We have no power, we just submit the form to the Account Specialists. You should be called back in 24 hours. I've not once received a call back. My old account is still being used for fake reviews, while amazon had completely locked out the account from being able to login on any device. I can't log in. Whomever is in my account seems to have complete control through some other method, which would explain how they were able to access my old account, even though I have 2FA and mobile authentication. There is a vulnerability they are not talking about.
  - throwaway324343 6y ago
    I'm so fucking pissed about this. I signed up for AWS with a personal Amazon.com shopping account. Enabled 2FA, lost the token. I can care less about the AWS account but no longer can I change my password on the shopping account I've had for 10 years.
    - thisisnico 6y ago
      And there is zero support to help you fix the problem.
      - throwaway324343 6y ago
        There is a MFA reset process that requires a notary and what not. Wouldn't be an issue for the average Joe but since I've moved 3 times since signing up for AWS, I'm not sure which address they need and not even sure I can procure sufficient documents with those addresses on them.
cloudking 6y ago
Have you tried account recovery? https://accounts.google.com/signin/recovery https://accounts.google.com/signin/recovery
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
EricE 6y ago
Having been an administrator for a Google business account in the past (and not a small one either) I can state from experience that if your problem doesn't have something to do with advertising or search, you are a distant (incredibly distant) third on Google's priorities. And search is a pretty distant second from advertising. Google is majority an ad company, that's what motivates them and it shows in their lackluster customer service for anything that isn't advertising. Rely on them at your peril. They have slick products as long as they work but good luck if something goes sideways.
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  As a counterpoint: I’ve found the GCP paid support to be excellent, but that’s when spending thousands to millions of dollars a month. (Although the $150/month option was also very good when I used it.)
  - rckoepke 6y ago
    Indeed, I've found GCP support to be excellent. And honestly, even Google One support over the phone has been pretty decent quality.
  - techntoke 6y ago
    I have a G Suite account and GCP account that I barely spend, and I've always had an excellent experience with their support as long as they could solve the problem. The only time I grew frustrated had to do with Google Music and their support didn't have any answers or solutions at that time.
acheron 6y ago
"Our technology is so sophisticated even we can't handle it. But that's your problem, isn't it?.. We don't care, we don't have to." https://vimeo.com/355556831 https://vimeo.com/355556831
- Diederich 6y ago
  Thanks, quite relevant though over 40 years old. This is a pretty accurate representation of how people felt about the phone company back then. Being able to easily talk to people all over the world was amazing and the technology was appreciated. However, still prior to the mandatory breakup in the early 1980s, customer service was often a bit of a joke.
- Anthony-G 6y ago
  Before I clicked on the link, I had expected that to be a clip featuring the Central Services engineers from Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
- dctoedt 6y ago
  Haven't clicked the link (yet), but I'm pretty sure it's Lily Tomlin on Laugh-In as The Telephone Operator: "Is this the party to whom I am speaking? (Snort, snort.)"
  - acheron 6y ago
    Same character, but that one specifically is when she reprised it for SNL in the late 70s.
blibble 6y ago
the ability to ring up and speak to a person in case of difficulty is the only reason I'm paying Google for GSuite with this revalation I won't be renewing
- techntoke 6y ago
  Google never said their phone support is for login issues and makes it clear you need to login for support, and the op (who is using a throway) said they didn't remember using a mobile number when signing up so it sounds like the problem is partly on them. If you've been a customer for almost a year and suddenly realized you don't have a number you can call for support, then there is no reason to be outraged since they never promised that in the first place before you signed up and you were too careless to look. They do have a help page regarding login issues: https://support.google.com/a/answer/6335621 https://support.google.com/a/answer/6335621
rckoepke 6y ago
>What does Google expect customers to do here? https://support.google.com/a/contact/admin_no_access https://support.google.com/a/contact/admin_no_access To the OP ( 'HelloThur ), this is the answer to your most immediate question. I found it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17120223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17120223 > Greetings. This is Alex Diacre here from G Suite Support. This has been flagged for my team and we’re looking into it. If any G Suite customer has trouble accessing their account they can always contact Google Cloud Support here: https://support.google.com/a/contact/admin_no_access https://support.google.com/a/contact/admin_no_access (this is a special form to use when you cannot access any admin account)
- disappearance 6y ago
  That’s a url worth copying into a password manager...
  - gerbler 6y ago
    Just to be clear, OP is factually incorrect. You can contact support using the above link if you are locked out. Source: worked on the G Suite Support team for several years.
    - smarnach 6y ago
      It seems this link should be mentioned in the email the OP got.
      - MrsHippy 6y ago
        If you cant find the link, you lose admin privileges. It's a test of merit.
    - markstos 6y ago
      Practically, he's correct. Google offered no such remedy in the reply detailing his options.
    - 6y ago
reaperducer 6y ago
What does Google expect customers to do here? As much as I enjoy bashing Google, I have to admit that Google is far from the only offender in this. I've seen it a number of time. Even Saint Digital Ocean has a similar problem. If you're not logged in, the only ticket you can submit is that you can't log in. I ran into this recently because it turns out that that DO's help system UI is completely borked in Safari. Type in a topic and click one of the suggestions, and instead of taking you to that topic, if just closes the suggestion list. The suggestions list has a bunch of carriage return icons, suggesting that you can keyboard through it, but that doesn't work, either. And the system doesn't work on a MacBook Air because it can't deal with anything but massive monitors. At the bottom of the suggestion list is the suggestion to submit a trouble ticket. But that doesn't work, either. But what do I expect for $5/month? The last actual Digital Ocean support ticket I put in (a couple of years ago, when the system worked) came back with a very polite reply to the effect of, "You get what you pay for."
Taek 6y ago
I had this same issue with CloudFlare. Lost access to my email account. Had my CloudFlare username + password, but CloudFlare insisted that I verify with my email since I was trying to log in from a new IP (it wasn't a new IP, but maybe they time out after a few months?). No way to make progress. Can't use support if you don't have an account. Tried making a separate account, so I could at least open tickets. Their ticketing system keeps closing my tickets before the issue is resolved, and it closes them as "resolved". The worst part is that I actually have both the correct username and password for the account, and I have admin access over every single domain associated with that account (via namecheap). Should be easy to prove that I'm the authentic owner of this account. Happily using Route53 now. Still haven't figured out how to turn off the CloudFlare billing.
- xena 6y ago
  If you file a chargeback, it should turn off billing forever (because you'd get banned).
  - Trias11 6y ago
    God bless chargebacks. So many worthless canceragenic corporate behemoth are hating this and the only thing they can retaliate it is with the "ban". Lol. Blow me. That said - sometimes it's better to swallow the occasional bad service vs. filing chargeback. For example if Uber "adjusts" your past trip for a couple bucks not in your favor - it maybe better to just absorb this, otherwise filing chargeback because of $8 will get you inconveniently banned.
- markdown 6y ago
  I too had the same issue with CloudFlare. The solution was to email support@cloudflare.com. You won't find this address on their website unless you're logged in.
  - Taek 6y ago
    I've definitely had zero luck emailing this address, tried for over a week. They tell you to log in and then they close the ticket.
oarabbus_ 6y ago
Oh yes, this happened to me once. Google has the least useful support of any large company in my experience. This is why I often go with AWS (or, depending on the nature of the company, Microsoft) despite Google's tools usually being more powerful/cutting edge.
tehabe 6y ago
I'm a Google One subscriber and so far I have only bad experience with Google's user support, so I'm not surprised that it isn't any better with G Suite. Bit sad though.
fivre 6y ago
we're getting to the point where the only reasonable answer is to regulate this, as the tech giants have well demonstrated that their only concern is to do the bare minimum trust & safety work that's beneficial to their business. users are an afterthought at best. if you provide identity services to more than 100k people or w/e, you need to have a defined dispute process, served by humans with the power to do shit, with legal recourse in the event that they fail to do so. the "run a flag up the pole on social media, hope you're important enough or friends with the right set of people if you want shit done" approach is terrible. the inevitable "but that will be vulnerable to fraudsters" backlash is stupid--the existing systems are too; fraud prevention and such isn't something you can ever do perfectly, since it's inherently adversarial. the problem we have now is that EVERYONE is treated as if they're a mastermind professional fraud network from the outset, and this does seemingly little to prevent actual bad actors. Twitter's trust and safety team is an even more egregious example, where they very effectively and immediately suspended my attempt to create a single parody account, immediately suspended it again after unsuspending it, and said any future attempts to reach them would be blackholed because the first unsuspend request was still open (there's, of course, no way to see that ticket or respond to it--all you get are email notifications stating that the reply-to discards all inbound mail). this, of course, does seemingly nothing to deal with actual bot networks, since those are run by sophisticated actors who've figured out how to game the system. something like Estonia's digital ID system is perhaps best, with, importantly, built-in protection against tracking: I should be able to generate an ID that a company can verify, but all they should be able to glean from that is that I have an ID and that I've authorized X other IDs for that company--it shouldn't be something that's traceable back to who I actually am or trace my actions across companies, which is very much not the case (and is something companies very obviously take advantage of for adtech purposes) for the de facto standard of using mobile phone numbers.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  Would you be ok if this law allowed a company to charge for the support request? Like, $50 to have a human review your dispute?
  - rexf 6y ago
shock 6y ago
Someone created a G Suite trial for a domain I own. There was no option for me to contact Google to tell them I did not create the trial account and do not want it, since all contact options required me to be logged into the trial account I did not create :)
- bonestamp2 6y ago
  Sounds like the Xfinity emails I receive. They end with "You cannot unsubscribe from these emails because they are account related". The problem is, I don't have an account. I don't even live in an area where I could have an account. I've contacted them multiple times and they cannot find my email address in their system. They've escalated it, had engineering teams look into it, etc. Nobody knows how/why I'm getting emails. If I was in a bad mood, I'd report them to the FTC -- the fines of $16k per email would be an enormous amount by now since this has been happening for 8 years. But, I mention it because some of us here create system that send emails and we need to remember to always create a way for the user to self delete or at least some kind of audit system for finding that email address in a system later. Oh ya, for about a year I've been getting someone's electricity bill from India too. Again, there's no way to unsubscribe, and worse I don't speak the language so my attempts to contact them have made no progress. Thankfully, it's easy to create email rules to dump these emails before I even see them.
- judge2020 6y ago
  To create a trial domain at example.com, you first get a domain at example.com.test-google-a.com and then you have to go through domain verification[0] for the real domain. Either they still have your domain as "pending" in G Suite, or they have access to your DNS/web server. 0: https://support.google.com/a/answer/60216?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/60216?hl=en
  - shock 6y ago
    They don't have access to my DNS/web server. That didn't stop Google from sending me 11 spam emails about G Suite. I think the first step Google should take before DNS/web server verification is to verify the email address used for the setup.
paxys 6y ago
I'm not sure why everyone is up in arms in this thread. Even if you could contact Google support, they wouldn't be able to help you since it's up to your GSuite domain admin to verify your identity and reset your account/SSO/2FA. In fact you were likely logged out in the first place due to policies set by your organization.
Animats 6y ago
What does Google expect customers to do here? Learn to embrace the pain.
eisa01 6y ago
On a similar topic: One of my friends got locked out of their Instagram account He tried to fill in the form on his Android phone to get the decision reviewed, but when he hit submit it just showed an error. He persevered, and after approximately half a year the form worked and he got access to his account again this summer! It's a travesty that normal people have no way to get a fair treatment by the FAANGs when it comes to support. I hope some consumer ombudsman could put a stop to this
- julianz 6y ago
  A friend had someone sign up for Instagram using her Gmail address by mistake. There's no way to unsubscribe and no way to contact Insta without logging in (and it was in another language). In the end she changed the password and took over the account; it was the only reasonable option.
molticrystal 6y ago
A one time use recovery passwords you can generate(or are compelled to) in case you lose access or are locked out seems like a better option, I believe mega.nz & live.com do that, if it is available with google, it wasn't obvious to me. I love Google's rational of locking people out. I have pop3/imap access to an old secondary gmail account, but whenever I try to log in by the browser, it locks me out and asks me to confirm who I am by adding a phone number. I never associated a phone number with the account and have no plans to do so. If somebody did get the password, they would be forced to add a phone number they are in control of if they wanted to take it over. So what was the point of that? Other than compelling thieves to enable and setup 2FA on gmail accounts on old accounts without 2FA that they've gained access to, almost certainly ensuring the owner never gets it back if they ever decide to check their legacy account again.
- tbodt 6y ago
  But if you add a phone number, that makes it harder for someone to take over your account.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    The more information you add, the harder it is for you to recover your account. If you add your phone number, fine, as long as you still have access to it. But say you add a backup email. Now if you lose access to either your phone number or your backup email, you can never recover your account. When I realized how this worked, I thought it was nuts. But it is.
ROFISH 6y ago
Google isn't the only one. Somebody must have used my domain to sign up for a Microsoft Teams something for some reason and NOBODY in my company can find out who or how. Microsoft is absolutely unhelpful in this regard, trying to activate our domain for Office Teams or whatever. Microsoft says it's for "security" reasons; but as CIO of a 50+ person org I should have some override on that in the event of erroneous signups. I don't even need to access old content because none of us has used the service at all. Just delete the old domain. For all I know it was a troll signup. I've since just forced my team to use Google Docs/Sheets because Microsoft is being so unhelpful that they won't even let us give them money, lol.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  To be honest, the alternative is someone being able to delete your organization on Teams. I kinda wish you could do like google analytics makes you do to validate your URL (add a DNS record)
  - rootsudo 6y ago
    You can, the whole point is verifying the domain in O365 by modifying the PTR record and CNAME so that the o365 panel will see it is yours. Support should've been able to remove it, I know I was able to do it on escalation cases when I was on Fast Track. I know that the "ambassadors" are really next to worthless, and if you do not have premier or a TAM on your account, you are really SOL on O365/M365/Microsoft products, you need to email the ambassadors managers, continually, and then go up the ladder, if needbe, to the product manager of that support team and just keep doing it. It really sucks. But the reason you couldn't add your domain is 99% most likely someone added and verified it. There are tools on the backend (most easiest Viewpoint) and then billing (CMAT) that can verify if domain is added.
- shiftpgdn 6y ago
  We had this problem with O365 a few years ago. Someone had signed up using our company domain and it created a mountain of heart ache. If I recall correctly we had to make a second domain our primary and then setup aliases for everything.
forcereboot1 6y ago
the admins should have a phone number also, when I was a admin on a corp G suite account there was a phone number also for support that we had.
lolbert 6y ago
i think he's complaining about dickheads like you
drudru11 6y ago
Same thing with PayPal
brainless 6y ago
I had this exact situation just 2-3 weeks back and had to use my personal Gmail account to start a community support thread and then got a link, which reset my G Suite account activation/verification process. I got access back in about 5 days from the start of the process. Update: Here is my thread on Google Community Help if it helps you or anyone else - https://support.google.com/a/thread/60347634?hl=en&dark=1 https://support.google.com/a/thread/60347634?hl=en&dark=1
smsm42 6y ago
Google auth UX is quite hostile. For example, if your group admin enables 2A requirement, you can't login if it your account doesn't already have 2A, and you can't set up 2A if you are not logged in, of course. So the workflow goes like this: enable 2A requirement. Wait for people to scream, disable 2A, let them log in and hopefully enable 2A. Enable again, let the next group of people whose sessions by now expired to discover they can't log in, disable. Etc. until hopefully everybody enables it. That seems to be the officially endorsed process: https://support.google.com/a/thread/6090262 https://support.google.com/a/thread/6090262 Sane approach would be to let people log in and immediately require them to set up 2A and then continue with their logged in lives, but I guess that was too hard.
- toast0 6y ago
  If your org is small, you can run a report to see who hasn't enabled 2FA and then yell at them. They made it better for new users a while ago (you can now configure a grace perioid), but I don't know/remember if this helps for existing users. If you've got users you can't cutoff who don't setup 2fa, then you need to make an exception group. You can run automation to send nag emails if there's people in it, etc. But then don't merge with another company with g suite, cause merging accounts isn't supported and you'll have a mess.
Taniwha 6y ago
Sigh - try contacting Facebook because they've let some bozo sign up using your email address ....
boromi 6y ago
I had the exact same problem, wow. I'm very happy to see this on hnews.
xiconfjs 6y ago
Same with Paypal...if somebody used your credit card information to buy something via Paypal without creating a account - so credit card fraud - there is no way to contact their support without providing a valid Paypal account. If you don‘t have one, you first have to create one.

465 points by HelloThur 6y ago

adoxyz 6y ago

Similar issue if you cancel your GSuite account. I cancelled my account and was still billed for it, but now there's no way to contact support since I don't have an active billing account.

g42gregory 6y ago
I was debating whether to purchase extra storage for Google Apps email as I am getting close to the 15GB free limit. I decided that I would pay Fastmail instead. I would not want to make my life/business dependent on Google’s whims.
- drewg123 6y ago
  I have heard horror stories about declined credit card payments for things like extra storage or premium YouTube causing people to be locked out of their accounts with no recourse. Due to this, I am afraid to pay Google in case things go wrong, so I use competing services instead.
  - thisisnico 6y ago
    This is why I refuse to use google for most services. Support is absolute garbage.
- nvr219 6y ago
  I'm such a fastmail cheerleader that I feel like they should comp my account. But I love them.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  I was debating whether to purchase extra storage for Google Apps email as I am getting close to the 15GB free limit. I decided that I would pay Fastmail instead. Then you're in luck, because Fastmail's $5/month option has twice as much storage as you're using: $30GB.
heavymark 6y ago
If you cancelled your account and you were still being charged, did you reach out to your credit card company to let them know about the fradulent charges? They should be able to block billing on their end, once they contacted google's billing to verify you cancelled your account.
- adoxyz 6y ago
  I wanted to speak to Google Support first and figure it out and make sure I wasn't misunderstanding the charge, but alas I could not contact support without a billing account active, so yes will be contacting my CC company.
- jandrese 6y ago
  Yeah, this seems like the obvious next step. No need to worry about ruining your account's standing if you've already closed it, and the chargeback should hopefully alert someone at Google to look into your status. Just don't try to use that card number to sign up for any other Google product. On the other hand, that charge might just be the outstanding balance when you cancelled, so it might be legit.
  - adoxyz 6y ago
    Yeah that's what's really annoying, I can't contact support to figure out if the charge is legit or not. So I can either eat the cost or file a charge back and potentially deal with a bigger fallout on my other accounts that I have with Google. It's a shitty situation either way.
- rckoepke 6y ago
  I'd consider this an absolute method of last resort for any of the large integrated providers like Amazon/Google/etc. There are reports where people have done seemingly legitimate chargebacks and while they get their money back, they also get all their myriad accounts closed that are associated with Amazon and new accounts made with work emails/etc also get closed. Chargebacks seem to be appropriate when you truly no longer want to do any future business at all with a particular company - it might not be limited to just "G suite" or "GCP", or "AWS" or "Amazon", but the whole conglomeration. Obviously YMMV, I'm sure people have had divergent experiences with this. I've always personally been able to get things resolved eventually through chat/email/phone, but I trust that not everyone has the same luck I do.
BrandoElFollito 6y ago
Where in the world are you to have banks which promote fraud? In my country (France) you can call your bank, declare that a fraud is going on and it then becomes their problem. They will usually issue you a new card and call it a day.
- adoxyz 6y ago
  I can call my CC company and declare fraud and get the money back and a new card, but then I'd have to update all other accounts that use that specific CC and it's a shitty experience. Being able to at least email google support would resolve this.
  - BrandoElFollito 6y ago
    Yes, you are of course right. This is a pain in the ass. I was referring to the fact that you are being defrauded, which I understood as "being defrauded and loosing money". I use GSuite since 2004 and the more I read about support the more scared I am. Good luck.
  - oauea 6y ago
    Also you will likely never be able to do business with Google again. So make sure you're willing to never use another paid Google service again.
- jasonv 6y ago
  Not necessarily true for this case. I had a problem with a [very well known US-based bank] credit card where a re-curring monthly charge that I wanted stopped.. wouldn't be stopped by the bank because I had authorized the recurring charge at the outset. Bank told me to contact the entity charging me, and when I said I couldn't reach them (which was true) and they didn't respond via their support channels, bank said I was SOL. When I said I no longer authorized these charges, bank said I was SOL. For a $10/monthly recurring charge, the bank wouldn't help me. So I used the same call to close all my bank accounts & credit card and moved my savings account funds to another bank account. Bank still wouldn't do anything about that recurring charge.

amrktrack 6y ago

does the account have 2FA?

jandrese 6y ago
He said he set up 2FA and then lost the "corporate device" providing it. This is why you always set up backup codes. The 2FA is doing its job here keeping the account safe from someone who doesn't have the token, which unfortunately is the account holder.
- HelloThur 6y ago
  Wow, didn't expect this post to blow up like this. For reference, I have no 2FA, nor did I lose my corporate device. I've always accessed it through a web browser, never through a mobile, therefore when it asks me to verify with my corporate mobile device, I do not know what device it is referring to.
  - jandrese 6y ago
    Which device did you use when Google first asked you to verify your phone number? Your personal cell phone maybe?
    - techntoke 6y ago
      They don't remember, which is probably how they got themselves into this mess, which everyone else uses as an opportunity to share their Google hate and call for regulation.
    - jlokier 6y ago
      Assuming it was their phone number. What options do they have now, if they abruptly stopped using that phone number for some reason 10 years ago and had no realistic way to know which 275 utilities were hitched to the number (or even if they did, couldn't contact support for reasons described in the article), for example: - because they couldn't afford to pay the bills for a while - or moved country - or changed contract and then found they couldn't port the number (happened to me) and lost the old number - or someone took their phone and they were unable in practice to recover the number or continue using it - or they were ill in hospital for long enough their phone contract expired and they could not have dealt with transfer issues at the time

52-6F-62 6y ago

I've had similar issues with lost/forgotten passwords. I actually have a bricked Nexus device because of it. Any password reclamation attempts are supposed to send an email to my backup account for resolution but the email just never arrives. From my reading it sounds like a common problem as well. And yet I have a newer GSuite email through work and a personal Gmail account for about 14 years (since beta) and no issues otherwise. Also at a loss.

saalweachter 6y ago

Does https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/5024607?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/5024607?hl=en help you? Reading that comment thread makes it look like (a) "primary mobile or corporate device" just means "the last device you signed in on", not like a special device, and (b) maybe it's a problem when you don't have two-factor authentication enabled?

zxcvbn4038 6y ago

This is the part where you have to launch a campaign to shame Google on social media or know someone on the inside to get your situation resolved. When you do get back in my advice is to enable multiple 2FA factors as that seems to streamline the account recovery case.

thisisnico 6y ago
I've had the exact same issue with Amazon. I had prime. Suspected suspicious activity. It's been 6 months without resolution. I just created another account but I've been calling in every day since. There is no escalation, I keep getting told the same thing: We have no power, we just submit the form to the Account Specialists. You should be called back in 24 hours. I've not once received a call back. My old account is still being used for fake reviews, while amazon had completely locked out the account from being able to login on any device. I can't log in. Whomever is in my account seems to have complete control through some other method, which would explain how they were able to access my old account, even though I have 2FA and mobile authentication. There is a vulnerability they are not talking about.
- throwaway324343 6y ago
  I'm so fucking pissed about this. I signed up for AWS with a personal Amazon.com shopping account. Enabled 2FA, lost the token. I can care less about the AWS account but no longer can I change my password on the shopping account I've had for 10 years.
  - thisisnico 6y ago
    And there is zero support to help you fix the problem.
    - throwaway324343 6y ago
      There is a MFA reset process that requires a notary and what not. Wouldn't be an issue for the average Joe but since I've moved 3 times since signing up for AWS, I'm not sure which address they need and not even sure I can procure sufficient documents with those addresses on them.

cloudking 6y ago

Have you tried account recovery? https://accounts.google.com/signin/recovery https://accounts.google.com/signin/recovery

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

EricE 6y ago

Having been an administrator for a Google business account in the past (and not a small one either) I can state from experience that if your problem doesn't have something to do with advertising or search, you are a distant (incredibly distant) third on Google's priorities. And search is a pretty distant second from advertising. Google is majority an ad company, that's what motivates them and it shows in their lackluster customer service for anything that isn't advertising. Rely on them at your peril. They have slick products as long as they work but good luck if something goes sideways.

alasdair_ 6y ago
As a counterpoint: I’ve found the GCP paid support to be excellent, but that’s when spending thousands to millions of dollars a month. (Although the $150/month option was also very good when I used it.)
- rckoepke 6y ago
  Indeed, I've found GCP support to be excellent. And honestly, even Google One support over the phone has been pretty decent quality.
- techntoke 6y ago
  I have a G Suite account and GCP account that I barely spend, and I've always had an excellent experience with their support as long as they could solve the problem. The only time I grew frustrated had to do with Google Music and their support didn't have any answers or solutions at that time.

acheron 6y ago

"Our technology is so sophisticated even we can't handle it. But that's your problem, isn't it?.. We don't care, we don't have to." https://vimeo.com/355556831 https://vimeo.com/355556831

Diederich 6y ago
Thanks, quite relevant though over 40 years old. This is a pretty accurate representation of how people felt about the phone company back then. Being able to easily talk to people all over the world was amazing and the technology was appreciated. However, still prior to the mandatory breakup in the early 1980s, customer service was often a bit of a joke.
Anthony-G 6y ago
Before I clicked on the link, I had expected that to be a clip featuring the Central Services engineers from Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
dctoedt 6y ago
Haven't clicked the link (yet), but I'm pretty sure it's Lily Tomlin on Laugh-In as The Telephone Operator: "Is this the party to whom I am speaking? (Snort, snort.)"
- acheron 6y ago
  Same character, but that one specifically is when she reprised it for SNL in the late 70s.

blibble 6y ago

the ability to ring up and speak to a person in case of difficulty is the only reason I'm paying Google for GSuite with this revalation I won't be renewing

techntoke 6y ago
Google never said their phone support is for login issues and makes it clear you need to login for support, and the op (who is using a throway) said they didn't remember using a mobile number when signing up so it sounds like the problem is partly on them. If you've been a customer for almost a year and suddenly realized you don't have a number you can call for support, then there is no reason to be outraged since they never promised that in the first place before you signed up and you were too careless to look. They do have a help page regarding login issues: https://support.google.com/a/answer/6335621 https://support.google.com/a/answer/6335621

rckoepke 6y ago

>What does Google expect customers to do here? https://support.google.com/a/contact/admin_no_access https://support.google.com/a/contact/admin_no_access To the OP ( 'HelloThur ), this is the answer to your most immediate question. I found it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17120223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17120223 > Greetings. This is Alex Diacre here from G Suite Support. This has been flagged for my team and we’re looking into it. If any G Suite customer has trouble accessing their account they can always contact Google Cloud Support here: https://support.google.com/a/contact/admin_no_access https://support.google.com/a/contact/admin_no_access (this is a special form to use when you cannot access any admin account)

disappearance 6y ago
That’s a url worth copying into a password manager...
- gerbler 6y ago
  Just to be clear, OP is factually incorrect. You can contact support using the above link if you are locked out. Source: worked on the G Suite Support team for several years.
  - smarnach 6y ago
    It seems this link should be mentioned in the email the OP got.
    - MrsHippy 6y ago
      If you cant find the link, you lose admin privileges. It's a test of merit.
  - markstos 6y ago
    Practically, he's correct. Google offered no such remedy in the reply detailing his options.
  - 6y ago

reaperducer 6y ago

What does Google expect customers to do here? As much as I enjoy bashing Google, I have to admit that Google is far from the only offender in this. I've seen it a number of time. Even Saint Digital Ocean has a similar problem. If you're not logged in, the only ticket you can submit is that you can't log in. I ran into this recently because it turns out that that DO's help system UI is completely borked in Safari. Type in a topic and click one of the suggestions, and instead of taking you to that topic, if just closes the suggestion list. The suggestions list has a bunch of carriage return icons, suggesting that you can keyboard through it, but that doesn't work, either. And the system doesn't work on a MacBook Air because it can't deal with anything but massive monitors. At the bottom of the suggestion list is the suggestion to submit a trouble ticket. But that doesn't work, either. But what do I expect for $5/month? The last actual Digital Ocean support ticket I put in (a couple of years ago, when the system worked) came back with a very polite reply to the effect of, "You get what you pay for."

Taek 6y ago

I had this same issue with CloudFlare. Lost access to my email account. Had my CloudFlare username + password, but CloudFlare insisted that I verify with my email since I was trying to log in from a new IP (it wasn't a new IP, but maybe they time out after a few months?). No way to make progress. Can't use support if you don't have an account. Tried making a separate account, so I could at least open tickets. Their ticketing system keeps closing my tickets before the issue is resolved, and it closes them as "resolved". The worst part is that I actually have both the correct username and password for the account, and I have admin access over every single domain associated with that account (via namecheap). Should be easy to prove that I'm the authentic owner of this account. Happily using Route53 now. Still haven't figured out how to turn off the CloudFlare billing.

xena 6y ago
If you file a chargeback, it should turn off billing forever (because you'd get banned).
- Trias11 6y ago
  God bless chargebacks. So many worthless canceragenic corporate behemoth are hating this and the only thing they can retaliate it is with the "ban". Lol. Blow me. That said - sometimes it's better to swallow the occasional bad service vs. filing chargeback. For example if Uber "adjusts" your past trip for a couple bucks not in your favor - it maybe better to just absorb this, otherwise filing chargeback because of $8 will get you inconveniently banned.
markdown 6y ago
I too had the same issue with CloudFlare. The solution was to email support@cloudflare.com. You won't find this address on their website unless you're logged in.
- Taek 6y ago
  I've definitely had zero luck emailing this address, tried for over a week. They tell you to log in and then they close the ticket.

oarabbus_ 6y ago

Oh yes, this happened to me once. Google has the least useful support of any large company in my experience. This is why I often go with AWS (or, depending on the nature of the company, Microsoft) despite Google's tools usually being more powerful/cutting edge.

tehabe 6y ago

I'm a Google One subscriber and so far I have only bad experience with Google's user support, so I'm not surprised that it isn't any better with G Suite. Bit sad though.

fivre 6y ago

we're getting to the point where the only reasonable answer is to regulate this, as the tech giants have well demonstrated that their only concern is to do the bare minimum trust & safety work that's beneficial to their business. users are an afterthought at best. if you provide identity services to more than 100k people or w/e, you need to have a defined dispute process, served by humans with the power to do shit, with legal recourse in the event that they fail to do so. the "run a flag up the pole on social media, hope you're important enough or friends with the right set of people if you want shit done" approach is terrible. the inevitable "but that will be vulnerable to fraudsters" backlash is stupid--the existing systems are too; fraud prevention and such isn't something you can ever do perfectly, since it's inherently adversarial. the problem we have now is that EVERYONE is treated as if they're a mastermind professional fraud network from the outset, and this does seemingly little to prevent actual bad actors. Twitter's trust and safety team is an even more egregious example, where they very effectively and immediately suspended my attempt to create a single parody account, immediately suspended it again after unsuspending it, and said any future attempts to reach them would be blackholed because the first unsuspend request was still open (there's, of course, no way to see that ticket or respond to it--all you get are email notifications stating that the reply-to discards all inbound mail). this, of course, does seemingly nothing to deal with actual bot networks, since those are run by sophisticated actors who've figured out how to game the system. something like Estonia's digital ID system is perhaps best, with, importantly, built-in protection against tracking: I should be able to generate an ID that a company can verify, but all they should be able to glean from that is that I have an ID and that I've authorized X other IDs for that company--it shouldn't be something that's traceable back to who I actually am or trace my actions across companies, which is very much not the case (and is something companies very obviously take advantage of for adtech purposes) for the de facto standard of using mobile phone numbers.

cortesoft 6y ago
Would you be ok if this law allowed a company to charge for the support request? Like, $50 to have a human review your dispute?
- rexf 6y ago

shock 6y ago

Someone created a G Suite trial for a domain I own. There was no option for me to contact Google to tell them I did not create the trial account and do not want it, since all contact options required me to be logged into the trial account I did not create :)

bonestamp2 6y ago
Sounds like the Xfinity emails I receive. They end with "You cannot unsubscribe from these emails because they are account related". The problem is, I don't have an account. I don't even live in an area where I could have an account. I've contacted them multiple times and they cannot find my email address in their system. They've escalated it, had engineering teams look into it, etc. Nobody knows how/why I'm getting emails. If I was in a bad mood, I'd report them to the FTC -- the fines of $16k per email would be an enormous amount by now since this has been happening for 8 years. But, I mention it because some of us here create system that send emails and we need to remember to always create a way for the user to self delete or at least some kind of audit system for finding that email address in a system later. Oh ya, for about a year I've been getting someone's electricity bill from India too. Again, there's no way to unsubscribe, and worse I don't speak the language so my attempts to contact them have made no progress. Thankfully, it's easy to create email rules to dump these emails before I even see them.
judge2020 6y ago
To create a trial domain at example.com, you first get a domain at example.com.test-google-a.com and then you have to go through domain verification[0] for the real domain. Either they still have your domain as "pending" in G Suite, or they have access to your DNS/web server. 0: https://support.google.com/a/answer/60216?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/60216?hl=en
- shock 6y ago
  They don't have access to my DNS/web server. That didn't stop Google from sending me 11 spam emails about G Suite. I think the first step Google should take before DNS/web server verification is to verify the email address used for the setup.

paxys 6y ago

I'm not sure why everyone is up in arms in this thread. Even if you could contact Google support, they wouldn't be able to help you since it's up to your GSuite domain admin to verify your identity and reset your account/SSO/2FA. In fact you were likely logged out in the first place due to policies set by your organization.

Animats 6y ago

What does Google expect customers to do here? Learn to embrace the pain.

eisa01 6y ago

On a similar topic: One of my friends got locked out of their Instagram account He tried to fill in the form on his Android phone to get the decision reviewed, but when he hit submit it just showed an error. He persevered, and after approximately half a year the form worked and he got access to his account again this summer! It's a travesty that normal people have no way to get a fair treatment by the FAANGs when it comes to support. I hope some consumer ombudsman could put a stop to this

julianz 6y ago
A friend had someone sign up for Instagram using her Gmail address by mistake. There's no way to unsubscribe and no way to contact Insta without logging in (and it was in another language). In the end she changed the password and took over the account; it was the only reasonable option.

molticrystal 6y ago

A one time use recovery passwords you can generate(or are compelled to) in case you lose access or are locked out seems like a better option, I believe mega.nz & live.com do that, if it is available with google, it wasn't obvious to me. I love Google's rational of locking people out. I have pop3/imap access to an old secondary gmail account, but whenever I try to log in by the browser, it locks me out and asks me to confirm who I am by adding a phone number. I never associated a phone number with the account and have no plans to do so. If somebody did get the password, they would be forced to add a phone number they are in control of if they wanted to take it over. So what was the point of that? Other than compelling thieves to enable and setup 2FA on gmail accounts on old accounts without 2FA that they've gained access to, almost certainly ensuring the owner never gets it back if they ever decide to check their legacy account again.

tbodt 6y ago
But if you add a phone number, that makes it harder for someone to take over your account.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  The more information you add, the harder it is for you to recover your account. If you add your phone number, fine, as long as you still have access to it. But say you add a backup email. Now if you lose access to either your phone number or your backup email, you can never recover your account. When I realized how this worked, I thought it was nuts. But it is.

ROFISH 6y ago

Google isn't the only one. Somebody must have used my domain to sign up for a Microsoft Teams something for some reason and NOBODY in my company can find out who or how. Microsoft is absolutely unhelpful in this regard, trying to activate our domain for Office Teams or whatever. Microsoft says it's for "security" reasons; but as CIO of a 50+ person org I should have some override on that in the event of erroneous signups. I don't even need to access old content because none of us has used the service at all. Just delete the old domain. For all I know it was a troll signup. I've since just forced my team to use Google Docs/Sheets because Microsoft is being so unhelpful that they won't even let us give them money, lol.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
To be honest, the alternative is someone being able to delete your organization on Teams. I kinda wish you could do like google analytics makes you do to validate your URL (add a DNS record)
- rootsudo 6y ago
  You can, the whole point is verifying the domain in O365 by modifying the PTR record and CNAME so that the o365 panel will see it is yours. Support should've been able to remove it, I know I was able to do it on escalation cases when I was on Fast Track. I know that the "ambassadors" are really next to worthless, and if you do not have premier or a TAM on your account, you are really SOL on O365/M365/Microsoft products, you need to email the ambassadors managers, continually, and then go up the ladder, if needbe, to the product manager of that support team and just keep doing it. It really sucks. But the reason you couldn't add your domain is 99% most likely someone added and verified it. There are tools on the backend (most easiest Viewpoint) and then billing (CMAT) that can verify if domain is added.
shiftpgdn 6y ago
We had this problem with O365 a few years ago. Someone had signed up using our company domain and it created a mountain of heart ache. If I recall correctly we had to make a second domain our primary and then setup aliases for everything.

forcereboot1 6y ago

the admins should have a phone number also, when I was a admin on a corp G suite account there was a phone number also for support that we had.

lolbert 6y ago

i think he's complaining about dickheads like you

drudru11 6y ago

Same thing with PayPal

brainless 6y ago

I had this exact situation just 2-3 weeks back and had to use my personal Gmail account to start a community support thread and then got a link, which reset my G Suite account activation/verification process. I got access back in about 5 days from the start of the process. Update: Here is my thread on Google Community Help if it helps you or anyone else - https://support.google.com/a/thread/60347634?hl=en&dark=1 https://support.google.com/a/thread/60347634?hl=en&dark=1

smsm42 6y ago

Google auth UX is quite hostile. For example, if your group admin enables 2A requirement, you can't login if it your account doesn't already have 2A, and you can't set up 2A if you are not logged in, of course. So the workflow goes like this: enable 2A requirement. Wait for people to scream, disable 2A, let them log in and hopefully enable 2A. Enable again, let the next group of people whose sessions by now expired to discover they can't log in, disable. Etc. until hopefully everybody enables it. That seems to be the officially endorsed process: https://support.google.com/a/thread/6090262 https://support.google.com/a/thread/6090262 Sane approach would be to let people log in and immediately require them to set up 2A and then continue with their logged in lives, but I guess that was too hard.

toast0 6y ago
If your org is small, you can run a report to see who hasn't enabled 2FA and then yell at them. They made it better for new users a while ago (you can now configure a grace perioid), but I don't know/remember if this helps for existing users. If you've got users you can't cutoff who don't setup 2fa, then you need to make an exception group. You can run automation to send nag emails if there's people in it, etc. But then don't merge with another company with g suite, cause merging accounts isn't supported and you'll have a mess.

Taniwha 6y ago

Sigh - try contacting Facebook because they've let some bozo sign up using your email address ....

boromi 6y ago

I had the exact same problem, wow. I'm very happy to see this on hnews.

xiconfjs 6y ago

Same with Paypal...if somebody used your credit card information to buy something via Paypal without creating a account - so credit card fraud - there is no way to contact their support without providing a valid Paypal account. If you don‘t have one, you first have to create one.