I may have ruined my life by formatting my computer and failing to understand the level that google demands in security these days. please help
Is there some way I can talk to a human being, either email, phone or smoke signals? I had a malware scare and after backing up every bit of data on my computer I formatted my C drive only to find an hour later I had done a very spectacular job at ruining my life.
Apparently having my password isn't enough, google sees the login as being new and sends a verification code to the account I can't access. I don't have a phone, i may have added my mother's mobile number at some point but I never actually logged into the account from there. I thought I had a recovery email set but it just shows ••••••@•••••••.•••. Which is different to when I logged into my secondary email where it showed the first three letters of my main email. I've no idea what this account is or whether it's even mine or a friend that I can't actually contact now.
I desperately need to talk to a person. I could answer security questions for days, describe god knows what about the account, the emails I have, the accounts I could try to do a pw reset that'd send the codes to my main email. Hell, I could tell them some of the things on my google calendar or in my google drive. No hacker could possibly know what I do and presumably nobody has logged into the account since last night. My mental is somewhere between permanent panic attack and suicidal, I just need to find a way to resolve this. I'll buy a phone and participate in all of that bullshit if I can just get my life back.
Posted Mar 4, 2026, 11:57 AM UTC