The Day My Google Account was Disabled / Locked !!!

What would you do if a criminal stole something very personal, and very valuable from you? What if they were able to target your business and cripple your income? You wouldn’t be too happy now, would you?

What if you also discovered that this was happening because of a sick crap mind that can affect your Google Account which might be your second life?

It was a bright sunny morning, after my return from college on winter vacations, I was enjoying my breakfast and signed into Gtalk with my username and password. It just said: "Invalid username or password". Even after repeated attempts just nothing, same message popping up.

Next I typed in Gmail.com on chrome, entered my Google username and password and hit enter, the next page was the most frightening thing in my life. It said 

Sorry, your account has been disabled.

It was like a night mare to me and I was just horror struck. I was in a fix and thought might be Google mistakenly flagged me and disabled my account. Wow!!! This can't happen to me. With my Google account, Google took away access to my Gmail, Orkut, Picasa, Alerts, Blogger, Docs, Feedburner, Groups, Notebook, Base, Knol, Sites, Reader, Talk, Webmaster Tool, SMS Channel, Health and many other services. 

My picasa web album showed: Album removed because violation of Terms and Conditions and every message to my Gmail account bounced back with message “Account Disabled ". Every thing related to my account was now down and so was I.

Google will not let me recover my GMail account. They were not letting me go through a series of captchas like their Google Accounts Help page says they will. Instead, Google has blocked or disabled my account, for no reason I can find, and will not let me log in.

Everything was black and down. I was sure I didn't violate any terms and conditions. Later with my friend’s Orkut account, I checked my scrapbook to find an unknown person's scrap saying: Your account is disabled, I can enable it, if you want to get it back scrap me. (Some of this text was in Hindi).

Looks like he tried to gain access into my account repeatedly using various means, which resulted in my account being locked by Google. But what now???

I even waited for 24 hours after read the test below but of no use:

Google has detection measures in place that flag accounts experiencing abnormal usage, or accounts that have been compromised. If your users' accounts are flagged, access may be temporarily disabled. It will take between one minute and 24 hours for access to be reinstated, depending on the behavior detected.

Unusual account activity includes, but is not limited to:

• Receiving, deleting, or downloading large amounts of mail via POP in a short period of time.

• Sending a large number of undeliverable messages (messages that bounce back).

• Using file-sharing or file-storage software, browser extensions, or third party software that automatically logs in to your account.

• Leaving multiple instances of your Gmail account open.

• Browser-related issues. If your browser continually reloads while attempting to access your inbox, it's probably a browser issue instead of a system control. It may be necessary to clear your browser's cache and cookies.

I knew 3 people at Google and asked them what to do next and even applied to account recovery procedure which I can't disclose in detail. After filling out multiple forms and exchanging many mails with Google, after 2 days and lots of tension with sleepless nights, I got mail from Google:

Hello Shubham,

Thank you for your email. We've completed our investigation and we're re-enabling your access to this account.

The mail included details as in how to restore my access to account.

Really this is the best bad thing that happened to me, but all well that ends well with an important conclusion : Don't take anything for granted. So I'm back guys... Rock On!!! Njoy!!!