Posted on 09/03/2008 10:53:53 AM PDT by MississippiMan
A couple of days ago, I was greeted by a message on my Gmail login screen that says, "Sorry, your account has been disabled."
I did click on an e-mail a day before that turned out to be a Google-related phishing attempt, but I of course did not enter any credentials or identifying info, or do anything that would provide assistance to the phisher.
I have e-mailed Google and e-mailed Google, to no avail. I get absolutely nothing except canned responses. I have been through their "report" process, during which I enter numerous elements of information to prove that the account is mine. The result is always the same: A canned e-mail saying that their investigation was "inconclusive" and that there's nothing more to be done, and that I should essentially kiss my e-mail goodbye.
The problem is that I have literally thousands of important e-mails stored on Gmail. I used it as my e-mail archive because I considered it a fairly safe assumption that Google would be around as permanently as any provider could be.
I'm very technical, and I have been through everything their website has to offer in the way of troubleshooting and problem resolution. I have called corporate headquarters, wherein I located a human who sounded like a robot. I was able to get to a decent human being in the advertising department who has promised to escalate the issue with real people, but in the meantime I wanted to see if anyone else has run into anything like this. It has the potential to be a disaster for me and my Information Universe.
MM
Probably your account got co-opted by a spammer and was being used to send spam email. I don’t have any knowledge of how Google handles this, but I would suspect the issue is that this happens a LOT and they don’t have much of a support department for a free service like GMail.
I don’t understand why they completely lock the account, though. I would think they would just change the password and disable it from sending email.
My advice is to be patient and give them a week or two to see what their response is. If you have any friends (or friends of friends) that work there, you might be able to get an answer as to whether or not you will ever be able to get your info back.
The bad news for you is that if you had IE save your passwords, merely clicking on that phishing attempt means that they GOT your user/pass for GMail.
When do you finally get back in, POP3 out all those emails, or at least set your email client to locally copy all the email on their system.
Outlook and Thunderbird both have those abilities.
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=50270&topic=13262#ContactForm
Also, you should *always* archive your email somewhere other than online anyway. You had a single point of failure issue that you created. Avoid that next time. :P
Good luck getting Google to help, and I mean that in the nicest way.
Are you logged in? Oh, wait...
Did you try to access the account through an emailed link?
I never use those, not even from “sources” I know.
For example, if my banks sends me an email and I need to access the account, I go to my favorites/bookmark link. That way, I know that link it to my bank and not to some phising site.
I have received some phishings from ‘PaypaI’ and from several ‘banks’ [I don’t have accounts in any of those banks — clue #1.]
“I did click on an e-mail a day before that turned out to be a Google-related phishing attempt, but I of course did not enter any credentials or identifying info, or do anything that would provide assistance to the phisher. “
When you clicked on that link, the phishing was successful if you’ve ever stored your account and password. Clicking on the link retrieves that information to the hacker. That happened to me once when someone stole my eBay account login info by the same method.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.