So I got a great deal on a flights and my wife and I went to visit my family in the U.S for the Lbaor Day weekend. Of course I logged into Gmail to send my mom a quick note to tell her we’d arrived safely.
Then I logged in today to send a message to someone else.
Because I logged in with a U.S. IP and then with a Canadian IP, it was considered “suspicious activity” and my account was disabled. To restore it, they want my phone number (private unlisted) which they are not going to get without a gun pointed to my head.
Anyone know if it will be going back to normal eventually? Or should I just kiss all my data good-bye?
If you had configured, in Gmail, an e-mail address at another provider for password recovery (as I did) you might be able to persuade them to use that for verifying your identity.
Commenting to subscribe to see how this turns out, 'cos it might happen to me. I have a Mexican IP everywhere in Mexico, except at work, where we have a Michigan IP address.
This is interesting because Gmail must be doing something with IP checking that other email servers are not doing. My niece has her Yahoo information hijacked and everybody on her address book receives scam mail from Asia. My Gmail account recognizes that the mail is not coming from her regular IP and flags the mail as spam every time. Meanwhile, Hotmail and my main ISP never catch it. In short, Gmail is checking IPs and others are not. Their rules may obviously reject some good mail.
I filled out there forms but I’ve had the account so long there’s stuff I don’t remember. They ask for the month and year of the creation date. I have no idea, sometime between 2000 and 2004 is a best guess!
I could fill out stuff like, most recent successful log-in, regular contacts, but it’s completely absurd to me that you can have your access shut down for legitimate use while on holiday! Isn’t that the entire point of the service - email you can access anywhere?
Have a look on your Gmail webpage (when you get back in), down at the bottom there’s a last account activity thing. Check that out, I got temporarily locked out because a whole load of spam was sent from my account from a mobile in another country.
What happens if you don’t have a cellphone or would prefer not to give your phone number to such a huge company that has no direct human contact or accountability? I would never do such a thing either. I’m familiar with the way Google customer service works, and Yahoo too for that matter. You fill out an on-line form and either a robot or human parses it for keywords and then they send a generic, and often thoroughly inapplicable, email in response that fails to address the problem. The useless message probably directs you to an FAQ, then you get to click “No this was not helpful.” Then you get to the same form you filled out the first time. If by some miracle, you get a phone number to call, it directs you to there website, and round and round it goes.
I was under the impression that IP lockout was an option you had to choose. Maybe I’m thinking of Facebook.
If you’re desperate, you could buy a prepaid phone. But I’m pretty sure you can work it out just by talking with them on the phone. But realize they’ll have your number just as easily if you do that.
Trying to google my own number yields absolutely nothing and googling my own very unusual name yields very little information about me either. If you choose not to provide information to public databases, it’s not terribly hard to keep your information out of their main system. Secondly, willingly providing your number to an enterprise can, in many jurisdictions, be “establishing a business relationship” which means they (and/or their partners) can have telemarketers call you, since you’ve implicitly agreed to it. Google uses 'bots for most functions which means there’s an enormous lack of accountability.
I hope the OP comes back with an update. I’m curious to know if it was really a compromised account or a false positive. I’ve had my Yahoo account for over 15 years and have used it all over the world and never had a problem. It would be interesting if logging into Gmail while on holiday was the cause. It would suck for all those kids backpacking through Europe if that was the case.
Google does not routinely lock down accounts simply for logging in from another country. In the last few months I’ve used Google in several countries without incident. Your wife’s account probably was actually compromised. Beyond protecting you, Google has a strong interest in making sure their infrastructure is not used to send spam. Since they are providing a free service, it seems like that is their prerogative.
I imagine that only an extremely small number of people refuse to use their phone number or can’t find a phone number to use. Google can’t plan for every contingency!
I agree with this. “Logging in with a US IP and then a Canadian IP” is hardly suspicious behaviour - thousands of people must do that every week.
I have never had a problem using Gmail from abroad - in the past month I have checked my mail from five different countries and never been asked any security questions. Facebook, on the other hand, made me go through a ridiculous “identify these friends from tagged photos” pop quiz when I tried to log in using my iPod Touch from a public WiFi hotspot in Guernsey. (I somehow passed, despite three of the photos not having a visible face at all!)
Bah-humbug! Well, I borrowed a relative’s Gmail account so I could log in to the Help Forum, and someone there sent me to a link to a helpful bloggy type thing, that had links to the recovery form. That’s what Gmail should have offered me from the get-go with the option of choosing SMS or phone - bit no, the form had never been offered to me, I had to go on a hunt for it (and you only see it when you click radio buttons, it’s not visible when you first peruse the page). A bunch of hours later, my access was restored.
Yes, indeed. It seems my out-of-country use that triggered the suspension. Everything was exactly as I’d left it. Nothing in my sent items, trash or inbox to indicate anyone was using my account but me. My recent activity log showed the log-ins as: Me, me, me, me in U.S., me - lockdown!
Don’t care. I don’t give out private unlisted information that isn’t necessary.
Tell you what, give me your credit card number. I’m a good upstanding guy who would never abuse it, I promise! Double-dog swear on my dead grand-daddy’s grave, cross my heart and hope to die.
Unfortunately some people are downright paranoid about their personal information. Do you know the real truth of it? Someone having your phone number isn’t a very big deal at all.
If you’ve ever bought anything online then many companies already have far more information than your telephone number on file. Google has been slammed in the press some recently, but by and large being afraid to give them your telephone number is survivalist mountain-compound level paranoia.
But, luckily we live in a world where you’re allowed to be survivalist mountain-compound paranoid, so if that’s your preference it’s certainly no one’s place to tell you to live otherwise. I would say that being afraid to give out your phone number because you somehow think it’s a ground-breaking piece of personal information is ludicrous.
Equating it to a credit card number is equally ludicrous. While without an expiration date a credit card number is “difficult/impossible” to use, there are obviously big problems with giving out your credit card number to a random individual. However I wouldn’t be afraid at all to buy something from Google using my credit card number. The damage done to a big company like Google if its payment systems were compromised would be vastly larger than whatever minor damage I would suffer if my personal credit card was compromised (especially since compromised credit cards can be resolved typically in a manner much more painless than information-theft prevention/insurance salesmen would like you to know.)
Finally, asking someone to give you their personal credit card number is a terrible piss-poor debate tactic. How about offer to exchange phone numbers? I actually bet a lot of people would have no problem at all giving their phone number out to a random person on the internet. Random people call my cell phone all the time, no skin off my back if one of them found it on the internet.
