Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by JohnMakin 225 days ago
The whole "Please verify information only available to you when you login to re-enable your login" is such a malicious pattern I've run into google in a ton of different services. Other companies do similar, but it's just such a blatant fuck you I find it hard to believe someone seriously sat down and thought it was a good idea.

I had it once where a service I was using for google got mysteriously suspended, but that didn't stop them from charging the card for months. Since I couldn't get back in to cancel, I ended up having to completely suspend the card. That's the kind of behavior scammy porn sites do. You wouldnt necessarily expect it from a multi trillion $ hyperscaler.

3 comments

The AWS subreddit regularly has people who can't recover their account because their email's DNS is handled by and the domain is registered… with AWS.
eBay/Paypal were one of the worst when they were merged. It was so bad I wound up having a new account every 6 months or so. I learned that when they started asking for personal details your chances of being reinstated were nearly zero. The lesson was I had an acct suspended, and they asked for DL, then birth certificate, then a lease, then a power bill, then a phone bill, every time I gave them the document they asked for something else. Then finally they said they needed my passport. I said I didn't have one, suddenly THAT was the only thing that could solve this, and I understood that this was just the plan. They keep asking for different things until you can't provide it or the info they have is wrong and they'll never believe you.
This happened to me in college. They never refunded my $7k balance. It was devastating to me at the time. The experience has played no small role in me becoming a cryptocurrency believer and advocate for the unbanked.
Yep, they took $3,800 from me. Nearly took another $2,400 but I was able to refund that to the sender before they stole it all.
Very similar thing happened to me with LinkedIn earlier this year. Account disappeared, never given a reason - I only used it to interact with job listings.
PayPal still does that
I had to do exactly this with Oracle. They couldn't fix my account to be able to change my billing, but I still had access to my resources. But I couldn't change anything and I figured it was just a sign that breaking my rule of never dealing with Oracle was a bad idea so I shut it down. Then had to cancel the card to get the billing stopped because multiple long calls and chats with CS couldn't get that fixed.