Google Banned Me From Google Voice

After 15 years, Google banned me from Google Voice. This post is a summary of what happened, with the hope that it might help someone in the future who runs into the same situation. At the end, I have some thoughts about the latent danger of being banned from Google at any time with no notice.

Background

I got my first cell phone in high school and immediately signed up for Google Voice simply because I wanted to be able to send and receive texts from my computer. So my Google Voice number is the only one I’ve ever given out to friends, and I use it as my phone number whenever I can. The only time I use my “real” Verizon phone number is when I can’t receive verification codes because some services block VoIP numbers.

That was a minor annoyance, and I’ve loved being able to text and even call from any device, even if my phone was off or not in service (e.g. traveling internationally). So I stuck with it for 15 years. My only worry has been that it seems like another product that Google could easily decide to kill off and send to the Google graveyard at any moment. But that turned out to be the wrong worry for me.

Getting Banned

My problems started on October 4, 2024. I got a notification on my phone saying I had been logged out of my Google account. This had never happened to me before, and I thought someone might be trying to hack into my account. I was concerned but not terribly worried because I had two-factor authentication turned on. On my personal laptop, I saw a notification that I had been logged out of Google Drive.

I logged back in on my phone and laptop, going through two-factor authentication both times. Then I checked the security log for my Google account. I saw that my account had been disabled at 12:55 pm, but the log didn’t have any details about why. Logging back in had restored my account at 2:38 pm.

The log didn’t have any other security activity, like login attempts. I even reviewed my full Google activity but didn’t see anything that I didn’t recognize. Everything seemed back to normal, so I went back to work.

A few hours later, I tried sending some pictures in a group text in Google Voice. The first picture went through fine. But when I tried to send a second one, I received an error message that said something like “Sorry, there was an error. Please try again later.” I retried a few times. Then I tried sending a plain text message to my wife and got the same error.

I was worried that it was related to my account being deactivated, but the optimist in me thought that maybe Google Voice was having an outage. Until I got home and went on my laptop to check Google Voice in my browser. It redirected me to this Google support page with this message:

Unable to access a Google product

If you’ve been redirected to this page from a particular product, it means that your access to this product has been suspended. Read on for more information.

Your access to this Google product has been suspended because of a perceived violation of either the Google Terms of Service or product-specific Terms of Service. For specific product guidelines, please visit the homepage of each Google product you’re interested in for a link to its Terms of Service.

Google reserves the right to:

• Disable an account for investigation.
• Suspend a Google Account user from accessing a particular product or the entire Google Accounts system, if the Terms of Service or product-specific policies are violated.
• Terminate an account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.

Next steps for suspended accounts: If you believe your access to this product was suspended in error, contact us.

Tip: If you are not redirected to this page from a product, review your service restrictions to file an appeal.

My heart sank. Getting banned by Google’s automated systems is a situation that I have read plenty of stories about, and I had an idea of what was next: a Kafkaesque situation in which I would probably never talk to an actual human being, I’d never get any useful details, and I would likely be forced to accept losing my phone number.

I tried making an outbound call. It didn’t work. I asked my wife to call me. That didn’t work either. I asked my wife to text me. From her perspective, it looked like it worked, but I never received it. That was even worse because it meant that anyone who texted me wouldn’t get any indication that anything was wrong.

First Appeal

The Google support page advised me to submit a form appealing the suspension. I did so immediately, explaining that I was suspended right after sending a picture and noting that I had been logged out of my Google account earlier in the day. I received an automated email:

Thank you for contacting us about restoring access to your Google Account.

Google will review your appeal as soon as possible. Most requests take 2 business days to review, but some might take longer.

You may be able to download your data from some Google services. To get started, sign in to your account. If your account is eligible, you’ll see a link to download your data.

Thanks for your patience.

I did try to use Google Takeout to export my data, but Google Voice no longer shows up in the list of products, even though I’m sure it did in the past because I have exported my Google Voice data before. So the suspension presumably affected that as well.

I subscribe to a Google One plan. I knew that one of the more understated benefits is the ability to get live support from an actual person, something that is generally impossible with Google. I had nothing to lose, so I started a chat. It ended up being a waste of time because the person I talked to was fixated on me mentioning getting logged out of my account. So they started recommending ways to protect my account. When I brought the conversation back to the Google Voice suspension, they were unable to access the ticket that was created when I submitted my appeal. So I ended the conversation.

On October 6 (two days later), I heard back about my appeal:

Hello,

We have reviewed your request and cannot reinstate your Google Voice service. Your Google Voice service has been suspended for violations of our Google Voice Policies.

If you have any further questions, please consult the Google Voice Help Center.

Thanks,

Google Voice Support Team

Second Appeal

On October 7, I submitted a second appeal. I explained that I reviewed the Google Voice policies and did not believe I violated any of them. I never sent large quantities of texts, I never sent commercial texts, I only texted friends and family, and there was nothing remotely inappropriate about the picture I sent right before I was suspended. The picture was of four adults around a baby in a stroller on a sidewalk. The baby is dressed and even has a blanket on him. I added that that was the only text I sent on the day I was suspended, and I didn’t make any calls that day.

On October 8, I received the same reply that I got for the first appeal.

I considered writing this blog post immediately, posting it to Hacker News, and hopefully getting enough traction that someone at Google would see it and do something about it. But I didn’t bother because even on the off chance that it worked, I wouldn’t be able to trust Google Voice again and would still want to port my phone number out.

Reclaiming My Number

At this point, porting my number out was my only priority. I didn’t want to tell all my friends and family to use a new number. And I didn’t want to deal with trying to update my number for a countless number of services, especially since I’m sure it’d be a hassle for many of them without access to the old number.

I did some searching and learned that the Google Voice subreddit has an entire document on suspensions. People apparently post about suspensions often enough that the subreddit disallows threads on suspensions since there’s nothing they can do about them.

I found one wonderfully detailed post (“Account Suspended - Reclaiming your Number and your Dignity; a How-To Guide”) that has been removed because of the subreddit’s rule. But that post, as well as another one that is still up, said the posters were able to get their numbers out by filing complaints with the FCC. So I planned to do that, expecting the whole process to take a couple of months.

On October 9, I added a new line to my Verizon plan as a target for my Google Voice number. A silver lining is that with the new line, I was able to get a new iPhone 15 for almost free after bill credits. I initiated a port in request for my Google Voice number. I expected the port to fail, since I was unable to access my Google Voice account to unlock the number. Then I would submit the FCC complaint.

But to my pleasant surprise, the port went through in a couple of days! I activated service on the new iPhone with my old Google Voice number. I did have an issue where I could make calls and send and receive texts, but I couldn’t receive calls. I called the Verizon port center (1-888-844-7095), and the person who helped me did something on their end to truly finish off the port. After that, I could receive calls as well. So I never needed to use the FCC’s muscle.

Then I did a number swap between my Verizon lines so that I can use my former Google Voice number on my Android phone instead of the iPhone.

After a couple of days, I looked up the number on FreeCarrierLookup, and it showed up as a wireless Verizon number. Previously, it showed up as a landline, and the carrier was Bandwidth, which is apparently what powers Google Voice SMS in the backend.

On October 23, I received an email from Google Voice saying that my number was ported away:

Hello Danny Guo,

This email is to confirm that your Google Voice number (xxx-xxx-xxxx) has been ported away from Google Voice. Calls made to that number will no longer ring your forwarding phones and new voicemails won’t appear in your Google Voice inbox.

Your Google Voice account has been downgraded accordingly, but your existing voicemails and text messages remain available in your inbox. You can also continue placing calls from Gmail.

You can upgrade your account at any time by getting a new Google Voice number.

Thanks

The Google Voice team

Now when I open Google Voice on my phone, it asks me to pick a new number as if I’m starting from scratch. But on web, it still redirects me to the suspension page.

Retrospective

I have conflicted thoughts about what happened. I’ve used Google services for the majority of my life. In college, I remember playing would you rather at lunch, and a friend asked if I’d rather lose access to everything Google or lose a physical sense. I really had to think about it.

I’ve only ever used Android smartphones and smartwatches, despite being virtually the only one among my friends and family to not have switched to iPhone. Which makes me the person who tends to get grief for ruining group chats by turning them into green bubbles.

And I directly pay Google by subscribing to Google One, YouTube Premium, and Google Workspace (just for my custom domain email).

One major reason I’ve stuck with Google for so long is that I value using services that are multiplatform. I may have an Android phone and watch, but I also have a MacBook and an iPad.

And I still think Google Search can be pretty magical. Despite its decline and the fact that LLMs are just better for certain searches.

Fear

But relying on Google worries me because of all the stories I’ve read about people being banned. Sure, some of those cases might be lacking some details that would justify the bans, but I was convinced enough to put a lot of effort into migrating away from Gmail several years ago. Consider how important your email account is to your digital life and how awful it would be to suddenly lose access to your email with no warning.

By now, everything important uses my custom domain email address. I do use Google Workspace for it, so i’m technically still using Gmail. But the point is that I control the address. If Google bans me one day, all I have to do is update my DNS records to switch to something like Fastmail.

The possibility of a Google ban is also one small reason I haven’t gotten into Android development. I could accidentally violate their terms and get banned from publishing apps in an instant.

And I deliberately do not take any pictures of my infant son nude on the off chance it gets flagged as child sexual abuse material after being uploaded into Google Photos, and my entire Google account is banned. With my recent situation, I consider myself lucky that I was at least only banned from Google Voice.

It says something that my biggest issue with Google isn’t that their services aren’t good anymore or that they kill things off all the time. It’s that I’m afraid they will just ban me with no recourse. It finally happened, and it wasn’t even for a service that I was worried about.

Caveats

I work in software and in fintech. I can understand that Google operates at such a massive scale that many things have to be automated, and even if there are some false positives, that could be a worthy tradeoff to Google to not have to put humans into the loop.

I also understand the logic of not telling people what rules they broke because you don’t want bad actors to get a better understanding of the system because that would allow them to fine tune their attacks accordingly.

Curiosity

But I’m still frustrated about temporarily losing my phone number. Sure I never paid for Google Voice, but Google never gave me an option to pay for it. In this case, I would have happily paid $100 just to find out why exactly I was banned. What rule or model decided I needed to be banned?

Part of it is curiosity. Was the last picture I sent the issue? Getting logged out of my phone earlier in the day suggests it wasn’t. But I didn’t do anything else on Google Voice that day, and I barely sent any texts or made any calls in the days before. I’m confident that if a real person looked at my account, they’d agree something in the automation went wrong. You may have some skepticism. Unfortunately, I can’t provide my activity, since I can’t see it anymore after the app recognized that my number was ported out. But I’m not the only one dealing with this kind of a situation.

I wonder if I should be more upset. Maybe I should actually try to vote with my wallet and switch to that iPhone, move my files from Google Drive to iCloud or Dropbox, and migrate to Fastmail. But I know Google can afford to simply not care.