Over the last week I was receiving emails saying someone in France and England was trying to recover my account. Obviously I declined the confirmation attempts and moved on.
Changed password. Confirmed my secondary recovery account and phone number information.
Today, I was called by a google number:
+1 (650) 253-0000
And a guy with a very Californian accent said he was contacting me from google because they saw some unauthorized attempts to access my account, and he wanted to confirm that with me— and help take steps to secure my account and prevent further recovery attempts from outside of the US.
He said he would need to send a confirmation prompt to my phone, and I’d have to accept it.
He sent an account recovery prompt from California, and said i need to accept the prompt to confirm my identity and ownership of the account.
He was trying to actively recover my account and steal possession of it, while on the phone with me.
I said “google would never operate this way, you’re scamming me.”
He assured me he wasn’t and that I could google search his phone number and see it was google, and said I could even call back and someone could reconnect our call if I wanted to be sure.
He was completely bluffing— as when you call that number you cannot get a human on the line. They don’t staff that line with agents.
Obviously, I didn’t accept the prompt but just wanted to catalog this somewhere so people searching in the future have something to read.
The best thing I’ve read regarding these attempts is “google will NEVER call you out of the blue. They don’t care about your account.” Be highly suspicious and never give anyone a code or password and never accept those recovery prompts unless you are 10000% certain YOU issued them.