Skip to content
Marketing Your Property
Account Closed
  • South Bend, IN
154
Votes |
318
Posts

Handcuffed in Google Voice Jail.....don't do this.....

Account Closed
  • South Bend, IN
Posted Aug 10 2017, 17:21

I will start with what happened and then circle back to the beginning since it is a long story. Basically, I was suspended by Google from using Google Voice. I could not receive calls or send texts.

Also to keep the post from getting too lengthy, I will break it into two posts.....what happened before and what happened after.

WHAT HAPPENED BEFORE 

I use Google Voice on an Android/Windows platform as I assume several people on BP do. 

Despite the apparent confusion with Google's various platforms as far as voice/text messaging (SMS/MMS)/video calls go and the various incarnations they have gone through, I got in early with the native Google Voice and then integrated and moved to the Hangouts application when they presented that option.

So what I have is Google Voice as the background brain/command center but I do everything in Hangouts with the Hangouts App and the Hangouts Dialer. I hardly ever have to log in to the actual Google Voice interface. Hangouts handles voice/text messaging (SMS/MMS)/video calls on my phone, tablet and PC and everything syncs and works flawlessly. On my PC, Hangouts is available as an extension or app within the Google Chrome Browser. I have never used video calls or made voice calls on my PC though. I can send/receive texts on my PC though which is pretty convenient with a regular size keyboard. As an added bonus, Google Voice and my Hangouts integration are free.

I said all that to say this, I got into Google Voice early and never bought in to any of the changes (except integrating into Hangouts) so I am immune (for now) to the changes and restrictions imposed on new comers. As long as my Google Voice/Hangouts/Hangouts Dialer system works (and it does), it does everything I need it to do. I am thus content and I hope nothing changes anytime soon.

Without going into details, the various incarnations have been GChat, Project Fi, and most recently the spin-off of Hangouts into Allo and Duo (for consumers) and Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat (for enterprise). Allo is for messaging and Duo is for video calls for consumers. Hangouts Meet is for video meetings (up to 30 people) and Hangouts Chat is for text conversations and document sharing for enterprise teams.

Fortunately for me, apart from the enterprise upgrades, I can pretty much do everything in Hangouts and I am not being forced to change anything in the foreseeable future since I am "grandfathered in" you might say.

So, everything was going smoothly until I recently fired off 29 text messages in Hangouts on Android to some of my contacts that I had not communicated with in over 6 months and needed to catch up with. Basically, I wrote one message and copied and pasted the same message 28 times....only the first text message one was slightly different. I did not send a group text, I sent each text separately but did it all within 15-20 min. I could have sent 20-30 more but I did not since I was worn out after a long day and figured I would send the rest the next day.

When I got to it the next day, I had trouble sending the same copy and paste text to the 30th contact in Hangouts and it totally denied me the ability to send the text to the 31st. I tried and tried, closing and re-starting Hangouts but nothing worked. It simply would not send the same text to the 31st contact. I gave up and later that day, figured I should log in to the actual Google Voice interface on my PC and see what was up.

I was shocked to find out that I could log in to my google account, gmail, hangouts, basically every app I tried but when I tried to log in to the Google Voice app I was met with a message that said my access to the Google Voice app had been suspended. I tried to log in to the Google Voice app on my Android and could not. It slowly dawned on me that the system had interpreted my actions in sending the 28 similar texts in a short time-frame as a possible spammer and either flagged me and eventually suspended me from accessing the Google Voice app and the Hangouts app for outgoing texts and incoming calls.

Having had the Google Voice number for 3 plus years with no issues and having invested a lot into it, this was a sudden blow that I did not expect. 

Loading replies...