Title: Hi HN. I am at my wit&#x27;s end so I&#x27;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 &quot;wrong&quot; here so I&#x27;m asking HN for help.<p>* 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&#x27;ve taken hundreds of 5-star rides, never comitted any fraud, I don&#x27;t drive for Lyft or even know anyone who does. To this day I still don&#x27;t know what I did &quot;wrong.&quot;<p>* 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.<p>* Letgo. It&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t even gotten responses to the post.<p>* Google. I tried logging in to an old account associated with some domains in Webmaster Tools. That&#x27;s all I use this account for and I haven&#x27;t logged in in years. I enter in the right password and am greeted with &quot;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.&quot;. 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).<p>* 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&#x27;t used Twitter since.<p>* Fidelity. This morning I tried to log in to my investment account and it says my account has been blocked &quot;for security reasons&quot; 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&#x27;ve ever used to sign into Fidelity. They won&#x27;t even tell me why my account was blocked in the first place.<p>This is endlessly frustrating. There must be <i>something</i> unique about either me or my devices. I have a regular residental ISP in San Francisco, I&#x27;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.<p>Does HN know why my accounts keep getting banned? Especially for those who work on identity&#x2F;trust and safety teams in Silicon Valley who have inside knowledge of how this works.
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