This is not a hypothetical problem and you don't need to be deliberately targeted. It actually happens to normal people. And if it does you have absolutely zero recourse.

Source: I have a banned Google account (it's over 20 years old at this point). I know the password, but Google doesn't let me log into it. Every few years I try to unsuccessfully recover it.

If you have a Google account and having it banned would be a problem for you here's my advice: migrate. Right now. You never know when one of their bots will deem you a persona non grata.

▲

stephbook 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Can't you just create a new account?

	▲	kouteiheika 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You can, but you lose access to anything that was associated with your old account. Another fun thing Google did is to automatically (without my consent) add a required second-factor authentication to my current Google account. I have this old, e-waste tier phone that I use mostly only as a glorified alarm clock, and at one point I used it to log into my current Google account. Imagine my surprise when I tried to log in to my Google account from somewhere else, and it asked me for an authentication code from this phone. Again, I have never explicitly set it up as such - Google did this automatically! So if I were to lose this phone I'd be screwed yet again, with yet another inaccessible Google account that I will have no way of recovering. At this point I don't depend on any Big Tech services; my Google account has nothing of value associated with it (only my YouTube subscription list, which is easy enough to backup and restore), and I pay for my own email on my own domain, etc. So if I get screwed over yet again by a big, soulless corporation that just sees me as a number on their bottom-line, well, I just won't care.