Long story short about how I naively and foolishly set up 2FA using that account’s GVoice number for verifications and also knew nothing about needing to save GAuthenticator tokens externally, and later on, that device went permanently MIA:
With correct passwords and confirmation of the 2FA phone number (but no access to that 2FA phone), without any lockout imposed, and even though the 2FA account recovery security AI is devastatingly limited in its verification options, I verify the correct contact number and it forwards the SMS over, but I can’t access the text until I use the back email — I can and therefore should be able to verify with other legitimate means one-on-one with live homeland (Palo Alto) personnel who understand the injustice of it and are willing to manually assist in the recovery process, even if perhaps off the radar.
The third-party overseas Google One paid subscription-based tech “support” personnel I’ve thoroughly exhausted are entirely unequipped to correct anything, they’re totally incompetent, apathetic, and dismissive very slyly, barely within the parameters of their employee tech “support” scripted responses (pretty much the same shady behavior as most cellular company’s overseas tech “support”).
They aren’t real tech support, nor even Google employees, and have no backend access like Google’s unavailable homeland security team does. They even lie about scheduling a follow-up with a supervisor because there is no hierarchy of managerial phone support personnel.
The important details are that they work for a third-party subcontractor that imposes a different employee policy in a country far from Palo Alto, California.
The whole organization is a skeleton in a closet.There’s just nothing there for customer support.
Paid subscriptions to One are worse than worthless because those Filipinos can’t afford to be moral in that role in that country.
I know this is possible because articles have been published, specifically by Ron Miller at Tech Crunch (see link below) stating privileged connection for members of the media who use their publicity to leverage justice — which has been evident for him in the form of relayed access to informal backend tech support personnel — through someone who knows someone at Google.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/22/that-time-i-got-locked-out-of-my-google-account-for-a-month/
“On December 5th, I sent a note to a PR contact who I work with on Google-related news and I told him about my problem. He said he had gotten my case escalated and I should hear within 24 hours.”
“The Reset command never came.”
“On December 18th I contacted the poor beleaguered PR contact yet again and he wrote back. They wanted me to go through the process again except using my TechCrunch email instead of my other alternative. I pushed back that I already had an open case, but he suggested I do it and see it what happens.”
“Reunited and it feels so good I started the process entered my Techcrunch email and was simply asked to enter a new password and I was back in. After all that, that was all it took. I was ecstatic to have my digital life back, but I’m still shocked at a) how easy it was to lose access and b) how little recourse there was to get it back.”
So this is possible, and given the multitudes of dissatisfied Google employees and ex-Google employees, especially in this dawn of the degoogled Fediverse, I envision real possibilities.
TL/DR
So I’m here to request connection with anyone and everyone who can connect me to some real backend support before my account becomes scrubbed from the server.
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Verification I can provide:
• Access to the GVoice number with its voicemail password. With that, it should be made possible to confirm an audio verification code sent as a voice message instead of the default SMS I cannot access — if an audio verification message could be generated by Google support personnel. Good idea really.
• Password histories
• Temporary security Codes which the recovery process was supposed to prompt but did not
• Email addresses of incoming and outgoing emails
° Screenshots of Drive filesystem and filenames
• Screenshot of IP address of connected Chromebook
• Chromebook browser bookmarks
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Recordings and Documentation onhand:
• Emails and chats with Drive personnel
• Emails and chats with Google One’s Philippines subcontractor which includes attachments proving the Chromebook that was connected to the account is still in my possession connected to an alternative Google account, and those emails include screenshots of the IP address of the Chromebook with the Google Play Services Security Codes, which collectively prove my ownership of the limbo account. They ignored it.
The emails also include attachments of my photo ID. Bad idea, but I’d probably be fortunate if they abused that or jeopardized it anyway.
• Phone conversations with dozens of fully incompetent subcontracted, third-party Google One personnel based exclusively in the Philippines The recorded calls exhibit their discriminatory call center tactics and complete lack of any corrective resources are all whatsoever (not an embellishment).
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I want to know exactly who will present real password reset options because this is extremely important. I can’t contact twenty years of contacts anymore or ever again until Google just grants a password reset to me.
You say your phone is MIA? Like lost or stolen? Call your cell provider and have them blacklist the IMEI. Report the phone stolen if at all possible.
I’m trying to understand why you don’t want to go through official channels and I have read through what you’ve said in the thread and still don’t understand.
The Techcrunch writer who got “preferential treatment” did so by being someone who could be verified to be the person they said they were. You don’t have that option if you don’t want to give google any of your information (Some form of Identification, a recovery email, something).
What it seems like you have done is softlocked your account by using one account for Google Voice that is your primary account (and then set up 2FA to access that account using a number also on that account). So you’re locked out of your google account because you didn’t follow the proper protocols to set up 2FA. Not sure that has anything to do with poor implementation on Google’s part. That’s just user error.
You’re wrong. You’re not trying to help anyway, so there’s no point in justifying myself to you. You shouldn’t even be commenting.
Because I think if you could explain why you’re trying to go through other than official channels and if you weren’t so caustic to the community members here who have already tried to help you, perhaps you’d actually get some traction here. I still don’t think you’ll have things your way. But people are inclined to help people who are at the very least polite.
And I’m being taxed by someone who claims to have read my citation of experience both with 1) the account recovery security AI at the recovery login page, and (2 extensive exhaustion of third-party, overseas Google One tech “support”, both over the phone and through so many emails they don’t group to the service ticket — which after thorough exhaustion of over thirty of those disconnected proxied script-followers, that extensive observation has enlightened me as to the foundational corruption on which that entire subcontracted business model is designed — and, yet, who insists I’ve not exhausted “official channels”.
You refuse to see my due diligence?
Likely, you insist on misinterpreting it into something you probably think shouldn’t be considered outside standardized routes.
You know Alphabet, Inc is ridiculously corrupt and worse, yet, you refuse to expect that outcry as inevitable, commonplace, and beyond necessary.
So perhaps you’ll grasp my correctness in finding your wrongful interpretation of “you’re trying to go through other than ‘official channels’” as quite unarguably unhelpful and also wrongfully accusational. I stated I exhausted the “official channels,” yet you want to imply you yourself are entitled to audacity to gaslight me as though to imply I did not do the things I stated I did in fact do? Maybe you prefer to excuse injustice?
Google is basic. The issues it creates have rippled into catastrophic tsunamis of hoards of unfortunately-annexed innocent users. Those issues echo harmonics throughout those call centers. So it takes an apathetic, complacent, and caustic sadistic employee-slave to continually discriminate against paying customers by finding ways to use the subcontracted company policy against callers instead of proactively and ambitiously search out facilitative Google agreement terminology that could, can, and should be demanded one their end to fully rectify a customer’s naive and undeserved mishaps that are all too often directly influenced by Google’s inadequate onboarding prompts which do not ensure proficient user-end competence.
It’s very clear Google wants the mishaps.
The communications conglomerations throughout the corporate tech industry are deliberately wrought with convoluted inefficiencies that effectively present and aesthetic of support.
Perhaps you aren’t experienced and perceptive enough to recognize a lie when a Palo Alto’s headquarters of a major world corporation’s third-party, non-homeland subcontracted call center overseas is staffed by scripted employees who wrongfully identify as Google employees when Google or Alphabet, Inc is NOT stated on their paychecks.
I encourage you, instead, to imagine bright ideas instead of dwell and emphasize on defeatism. I have a sense of urgency about this that I value in terms of intellectual property, documented memories, social connectivity to family, loved ones, and professionals. To me, that’s a life of opportunity spanned over twenty years of user data submission to Google. I was naively-trusting of the cool-aid, and I even evangelized it, up until the day I discovered Google refuses to listen to 2FA mishaps they promoted into such devastating quantities. I see clearly now, and so should you.
Further, instead of wasting effort points on attempts to qualify a checklist of basic approaches I’ve completely surpassed myself, perhaps it can be clearly read in my notes of my fulfillment of the “official channels” that this post is evidently not nearly an initial strategy, so, again, you’re discrediting my dynamic experience insultingly.
I carefully worded the post title because that’s the exact level I’ve reached as a worthy ambition.
• "Some possibilities I can imagine may be ___________,”.
• "There’s a slim chance that maybe _______, but it will need to be presented with substantiation of _________, which may be possible via ________ . . . " or
• Similar fiercely optimistic routes.
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If you dare to disagree, I challenge you to study the Google Community Forum’s hoards of similar reports. If you still want to gaslight, I strongly encourage you to call your cellular network provider’s customer support department about a significant technical issue with their service you have experienced. Really, everyone who pays for lucrative technical services should absolutely do this, even as a primary exercise in the shopping process. I encourage at least twenty to fifty of those calls, all very closely considered for recognition of systematic behaviors and recurring default language. My challenge to you is to do whatever it takes to get the issue permanently corrected. With that goal, the objectives are to closely observe the recurring experiences imposed on the support-seeker all the way through to successful resolve of the technical issue. I guarantee everyone will come away with more questions and greater concerns than that of going into the process. Notate and record as much of the runaround specifics as possible because it will be realized it’s programmatic and even socialized within the employee culture of that workplace and occupational field.
You’ll find the solutions often necessitate a juxtaposition requiring your own ingenuity, resourcefulness, and fiercely creative optimism of alternative exploration far beyond their default response models in interpersonal communication with the “support” personnel to get them into candidly honest human-to-human communication about the deficiencies in their approach models — to fully acknowledge and consider honest ideas from you, not the “fully trained” tech “support” personnel. They won’t provide the possibilities within their reach unless you gain their understanding that collaberative extensions to coworkers, other departments, “higher-ups” as they like to call them (since they often also like to wrongfully claim that there are not any management teams in place), and also conjunctive implementation of formal complaints and grievances simultaneously in effect by that point are necessary.
At that point of obvious negligence, dismissiveness, or incompetence, it’s my hope and encouragement you’ll recognize and understand that you will have intimately discovered the haphazard nature of economics-based international corporate business models and the deep ground-level deliberate inefficiencies driving dysfunctionality throughout economies, and certainly throughout your own user-end and customer experience.
Then I strongly encourage you to do the same diligent pursuit with a better phone company. And another, and another (policy shopping if necessary), calling multiple subsidiaries and all the major companies until you’ve come to recognize they all follow the same monkey-see-monkey-do act of systematic, policy-excusable discrimination disguised in superficial conservative politeness, programmed employee training models, limited and irrelevant scripted responses, refusal, denial, unwillingness, and administrative office tools that enact dead-end runarounds into an inevitable annex.— such as redirects into unidentifiable disconnects caused by the discriminative call moderators.
I’ve done it enough to see it in oversized tech companies and several of the large tech companies. Midsize tech companies provide the best customer service while they still provide unadulterated products, services, and features and want a following. In the early 2000’s, all the major companies excelled in customer service until they prioritized lucrative economics models over the inclusive startup ethics. Then it’s all about By that point, I think you’ll be ready to attempt Google One’s personnel to recognize a terrible reality running rampant worldwide.
For the record I use just about every google service available. I have Google Fi, signed up for Google Voice in 2011 and have had it since then with the same phone number, use 2FA (yubikee), and use Gmail, pay for Drive etc. I live in the US which gives me access to options people overseas may not have as far as that goes (I live close enough to a Google office that if I needed to I could go to a physical location.
I have experienced their customer service and been on the receipt end of both the account recovery AI and their problematic customer service escalation tree. And because I both understand what Google Voice is and is not it isn’t my primary phone number and isn’t something I would ever use for 2FA. I also use a physical 2FA device specifically because I want to be in positive control of my ability to unlock my account in the event that I get locked out.
Know what else? I’ve also had people from the other side of the world try to access my account for purposes unknown using that account recovery AI and they were unsuccessful because I took the steps I did to secure my account and create a 2FA backup in the event that my device is lost or stolen.
Now you don’t go into any detail whatsoever even in your comments about anything of relevance that would help us help you. You don’t spell out how the system works in your country, you don’t explain what you were told (the specifics). You have posted none of the chat history or anything proving you’ve even contacted Google about this. For all we know you haven’t actually been talking to anyone actually affiliated with Google in any way.
Google can be trusted to be as corrupt as every other tech company about the things that make them money. They didn’t lock you out of your account according to your explanation. You locked yourself out of your account. They aren’t refusing to let you back into your account either so far as what you’ve said. They just want you to verify you are you.
I’m not apathetic. Someone who didn’t care wouldn’t have bothered to comment. But your language is flowery and amounts to “I am angry and am screaming into the void”. There is no substance to it. If this is how you talk to the call center techs I am not surprised that you haven’t gotten the help you requested.
If there was something tied to that account (a credit card or something) that might help you. If you could report the phone stolen, a police report would be helpful because that is an official document from a local government agency who would validate who you were. It would be something to provide to Google as proof of the validity of your claim.
If the channels available to you locally are not adequate then you’ll have to find another way to contact Google. Making a second account and using it to explore further options might be beneficial to your situation.
Making a second account and signing up for a new Google voice number would allow you to take screenshots of what you are seeing on your end and those might be helpful for people trying to guide you to getting the help you need.
Either way though I’m not sure how you expect us to help you besides giving the advice we have given? I’m assuming you were hoping to get the attention of Google employees. The problem with that is this is Lemmy, we aren’t reddit. I seriously doubt there are employees monitoring this place. If you were to try reddit or Twitter you might have better luck. Lemmy doesn’t have the user base to justify employees of big tech companies to spend working hours here. Good day, sir.