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Blog Owners Report Disabled Blogger / GMail / Google Accounts - May 2011

This week, we're seeing another round of GMail accounts being disabled, again (in some cases) with mysterious mention of "unusual activity on your account". Besides the GMail / Google account being disabled, the predictable loss of AdSense, Blogger, Picasa, and other services is reported. This is similar to an earlier experience from February 2011.

Blog owners, with this problem, report receipt of the advice "Your account has been disabled" when they login, with a link to Google Accounts: Account has been disabled provided, for more information.

The important advice, on the latter page, is in the last paragraph.

Please start by reviewing the relevant Terms of Service. Then, if you think your account should not have been disabled, please contact us.

Clicking on "contact us", you are presented a form My account is disabled.

All fields on this form, presented in bold type face, are essential. The most important field for you, here, may be the question
Do you currently have access to the email address that you use to sign in to your account?
If you select "No", you get
An email address we can use to contact you
Since your GMail account has been disabled, you will need an alternate email address, which you provide there.

Having filled out the form, hit "Submit", and you get the predictable
Your request has been submitted
And now, you wait. My personal experience with this, a few months ago, was maybe an hour of anxious waiting, before I got the email from Google announcing the reactivation of my account. Other people have had several days of anxiety. The observed variance may be similar to the known variance in the Blogger blog spam review process.

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Comments

Ana said…
It happened to me at this account here and the other that is disabled now.
On April, 29 it happened and my blog Hella Heaven was also deleted.
Today the same thing, only 5 days went by.
But it's taking more time than at the first time.
I have already been excluded from Bloggers, the directory, and I was among the top 10.
I believe that Google should find a way to dissociate Blogger from the account.
I don't know how but...
Thank you for the reply.
Sharkbytes said…
I've been waiting for over 24 hours. Still waiting. I did open my own thread on the help forum. I've been a serious blogger for over 3 years, and all but one of my blogs is on the account that was blasted. Repercussions are already occurring. I hope my case is looked at soon. I double checked the TOS, but I can't see anything I'm doing wrong. Certainly nothing on purpose.

I appreciate all your points, but it's pretty devastating to be in that small group of false positives (which I'm assuming my case is). If I had inadvertently done something wrong, I hope I'll be given a chance to correct it.
Sherry Collum said…
I didn't know spamming was such a problem, so I can understand Google's effort to stop it. But I don’t know why I was locked out. Was it because of an AdSense violation or because the spam bot thinks I'm a spammer? I just don’t know, and that’s part of what causes this horrible anxiety for all of us – the unknown. Google should at least offer some explanation as to WHY we’ve been locked out. Nobody reads my blogs. I think my AdSense account is up to $11.00 since December 2008.

I certainly understand the effort to stop blog spamming - support it even. But if that’s what causes this global disablement, don't think that effort should include a total lockdown of everything associated with your account. As nitecruzr points out, some of us have been locked out of Gmail, AdSense, Picasa – everything.

AdSense even has my bank information for EFT, and I can’t get in to delete it. It’s almost scary.

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