[notatoad]

They don't care if you resell your pixel phone to a friend or put it on craigslist. They care if you and a thousand other people are being paid to purchase stock for an unauthorized reseller.

Google (and any other product company) wants their products to be sold through authorized channels only so they can manage distribution, keep pricing consistent, and ensure that the devices are legitimate and have not been tampered with before sale.

Customers receiving phones with malware pre-installed is a real problem for companies like oneplus and xaiomi who don't clamp down on unauthorized resellers.

[yladiz]

That's a fair point, but the only reason this kind of thing happened is because they purchased their phone via Google from their Google Account, and the consequence, their account being disabled, is really out of proportion with the act of selling the phone to a reseller. I think it would be more fair for Google to limit the ability to purchase products in the future for people known to have done this, but significantly unfair/burdensome to disable their account as their account potentially has their entire life on it. It would be akin to the power company deciding something you did was "bad" and turning off your power, or your landlord kicking you out because of something "bad" they didn't like, regardless of your "bad" action.