Google accounts that haven't been logged into for years are basically dead at this point as far as I can tell. I lost access to a ~10 year old account that I d

Google accounts that haven't been logged into for years are basically dead at this point as far as I can tell. I lost access to a ~10 year old account that I didn't log into for years. With good (if unfortunate) reason; the vast majority of old accounts are made by normal people as throwaways and likely have weak passwords that appear in existing password dumps. There is no other verifiable information attached to Google accounts with which attackers can be differentiated from the original user aside from any login cookies residing on a device that logged in before, and old accounts likely have access to other accounts as the recovery email address which would let attackers gain additional access to other systems by harvesting old Gmail accounts. Your phone number may be associated with fraud in some way. Think about the only identifiers you give to these companies; IP (which changed without fixing the problem), name, phone number, email address. It's going to be one or more of those signals.