Hi HN. I am at my wit's end so I'm asking here. In the last few years, nearly half of all my online accounts for a variety of different services have been either restricted or banned for no reason. I have no idea what I could possibly be doing "wrong" here so I'm asking HN for help.

* Lyft. Got a generic error when requesting a ride, which told me to contact support. I contacted support and they said my account was suspended due to violation of ToS with fradulent activity. I asked exactly what they think I did to violate ToS and they would not tell me. I've taken hundreds of 5-star rides, never comitted any fraud, I don't drive for Lyft or even know anyone who does. To this day I still don't know what I did "wrong."

* Instagram. Signed up for an account a couple years ago. Followed some celebrities and friends. A week later when I try to login, it errors saying my account has been suspended with no reason and recourse for recovery. I made another account. Banned again after a couple of days. Now, whenever I try to make a new account, the SMS verification never passes. It is like they have blacklisted my IP address.

* Letgo. It's like Craiglist. I moved within San Francisco a few years ago and signed up for an account to get rid of some furniture that I would not be taking with me. Within a few days I couldn't login and support told me my account was banned due to fradulent activity. All I did was create a listing for a couch with some pictures! I hadn't even gotten responses to the post.

* Google. I tried logging in to an old account associated with some domains in Webmaster Tools. That's all I use this account for and I haven't logged in in years. I enter in the right password and am greeted with "You’re trying to sign in on a device Google doesn’t recognize, and we don’t have enough information to verify that it’s you. For your protection, you can’t sign in here right now. Try again from a device or location where you’ve signed in before.". What am I supposed to do here? Last I used this account has at an old address (different IP) and on a computer that has since been retired (motherboard swapped out, OS reinstalled).

* Twitter. I created an account several years ago. After a week when I logged in it said my account was restricted and asked me to enter a phone number for SMS verification. I complied, and even after entering the correct code, it errored saying it cannot verify my identity. Haven't used Twitter since.

* Fidelity. This morning I tried to log in to my investment account and it says my account has been blocked "for security reasons" with no other information or explanation. It says I have to call Fidelity. Over the phone they asked me to supply a ton of documents over fax for identity verification and a record of all the devices I've ever used to sign into Fidelity. They won't even tell me why my account was blocked in the first place.

This is endlessly frustrating. There must be something unique about either me or my devices. I have a regular residental ISP in San Francisco, I'm not using Tor or VPNs, I use a vanilla Mac with Firefox. I use an adblocker (uBlock) but so does everyone else. I have a bog-standard Samsung phone running bog-standard unmodified Android.

Does HN know why my accounts keep getting banned? Especially for those who work on identity/trust and safety teams in Silicon Valley who have inside knowledge of how this works.

user:	dynamohk
created:	January 16, 2022
karma:	49