If you've been redirected to this page from the sign in page, it means that access to your Google Account has been disabled.
In most cases, accounts are disabled because of a perceived violation of either the Google Terms of Service or product-specific Terms of Service.
Google reserves the right to:
Suspend a Google Account from using a particular product or the entire Google Accounts system if the Terms of Service or product-specific policies are violated.
Terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.
The only option from this page was to contact Google via some form; they said they might get back to you if they had new information to communicate.
Yikes.
Fortunately, our mobile phone does do text messages, as I found out when I went back to that page and requested the verification code. Obviously the account was restored.
When I logged into our Gmail account, it was obvious that someone had been sending out spam and using our e-mail address as a "cloak." That is to say, when they sent the e-mail out from their computer, they disguised the originating information to say that the spam originated with us. There were about 100 bounced e-mails in our inbox.
It's fine that Google has a form for contacting them, but I know from traweling the webmaster forums that Google customer service ranks somewhere below the ninth circle of hell, which is to say that if you ever receive individual attention from a person -- especially if you're dealing with a disabled account -- it should count as a miracle.
What do we have associated with our Google account? hmm.... Our e-mail address, our family blog which is essentially the only copy of our family journal, all the e-mails in our e-mail account, an online photo collection, and our Google Adsense account, which is a very substantial portion of our household income (about 15 percent). It's a little disturbing that Google can turn off such a huge part of our life with the flick of a switch just because some criminal took advantage of us.
This isn't just an issue with Google, though. Increasingly, we're being encouraged to move our digital lives to the "cloud" -- the cast network of computer servers that make up the Internet. Really prolific Facebook users are in a similar position.
What to do to guard against this? I have no idea. Right now, I have a crying baby to attend to.
Yikes.
Fortunately, our mobile phone does do text messages, as I found out when I went back to that page and requested the verification code. Obviously the account was restored.
When I logged into our Gmail account, it was obvious that someone had been sending out spam and using our e-mail address as a "cloak." That is to say, when they sent the e-mail out from their computer, they disguised the originating information to say that the spam originated with us. There were about 100 bounced e-mails in our inbox.
It's fine that Google has a form for contacting them, but I know from traweling the webmaster forums that Google customer service ranks somewhere below the ninth circle of hell, which is to say that if you ever receive individual attention from a person -- especially if you're dealing with a disabled account -- it should count as a miracle.
What do we have associated with our Google account? hmm.... Our e-mail address, our family blog which is essentially the only copy of our family journal, all the e-mails in our e-mail account, an online photo collection, and our Google Adsense account, which is a very substantial portion of our household income (about 15 percent). It's a little disturbing that Google can turn off such a huge part of our life with the flick of a switch just because some criminal took advantage of us.
This isn't just an issue with Google, though. Increasingly, we're being encouraged to move our digital lives to the "cloud" -- the cast network of computer servers that make up the Internet. Really prolific Facebook users are in a similar position.
What to do to guard against this? I have no idea. Right now, I have a crying baby to attend to.
I know a couple of people who have had their Google accounts taken over like this, so Google security must have some big loopholes somewhere...
ReplyDeleteActually, we've had this happen with the e-mail on our local ISP before. When we called up the tech people (you can call a real person at our local ISP!) for them to figure out what was going on, they said there was nothing we could do -- the spam people just alter the code indicating the return path in their e-mail to make it look like it came from you. Not a thing to be done about it.
ReplyDelete