The terrifying message sent to the people involved in the phone reselling scheme. (credit: DansDeals)

An odd story popped up this week on the deal site DansDeals. There was some kind of “deal” that involved making money through the resale of Google’s Pixel phones, and once Google caught wind of it, a lot of people had their Google accounts banned.

Apparently a phone reseller in New Hampshire was running some kind of crowd-sourced inventory acquisition program using the consumer Google site. It instructed people to buy phones from the Project Fi site and list the dealer’s NH address as their “home address” so phones would be shipped directly to the dealer. The buyers were then paid enough to make a profit on the transaction (probably helped by the fact that NH has no sales tax), and the New Hampshire dealer would later resell the phone at a markup.

When Google caught wind of the shipping shenanigans, it “suspended” the Google Accounts of everyone that shipped a phone to the dealer. That means these users were banned from every Google service—Gmail, all their pictures on Google Photos, their documents on Google Drive, and every other piece of Google data was taken away. Something like this wouldn’t only affect Google services; think about how many sites do authentication or send critical information over e-mail.