Story time: google threatened to kill all of my google accounts (fi, gmail, drive, etc)

A couple of years back, someone got ahold of a bunch of my account info. At the time, I was using google chrome to store all of my login credentials. I still don’t know the attack vector, but somehow someone got access to all of my accounts. Eastern Europe from the IP information available on some accounts and from the hundreds of newsletters they signed my email up for to mask their activity, but they likely could have been using a vpn.

They ordered a bunch of iPhones from eBay (easy enough to resolve) and a bunch of pixel phones directly from google. I contacted google about an hour after I found the order, asked them not to ship the phones because it was fraud, and filled out a ton of relevant paperwork.

They still shipped the phones the next day and then denied my fraud claim and told me to speak with my bank if I wanted the charges reversed. I filed a police report, spoke with my bank, and they reversed the charges.

Google then sent me a message saying that they were going to suspend my accounts unless I asked the bank to reverse the charge reversal. It was several thousand dollars worth of fraud that I didn’t want to pay for, considering they shipped the phones after being warned. I appealed, and their “fraud team” determined that there was no fraud, despite my police report, records of calling them prior to shipment, and their own emails to me warning that my account had been compromised.

I appealed again, and started switching away from google for phone, email, browser, etc. I also posted warnings publicly several places. Weeks later they reversed their decision, but there is absolutely no way I’ll trust google with anything important ever again. Through this whole process, it was impossible to speak with an actual human that could tell me what was going on, and I depended on their services to run my business.

Never again, google.

T-mobile works well enough if you travel internationally and need free data. Outside of that, I would probably shop around. I’ve heard good things about mint, but I dunno.