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.

According to DansDeals, the dealer ended up buying "a few thousand phones" through this scheme—with a purchase limit of five phones per account. That's a lot of people who were banned.

There's no arguing the facts: these users broke the Google Store terms of sale. This document clearly states, "You may only purchase Devices for your personal use. You may not commercially resell any Device." Google's response—to take away what amounts to some users' entire digital lives with no way to recover their data—seems like a disproportionate punishment, however. And after being poked by a couple of news organizations (Ars included), Google relented and sent out the following statement:

We identified a scheme in which consumers were asked to purchase Pixel devices on behalf of a reseller, who then marked-up the cost of those devices in order to resell them to other customers. We prohibit the commercial resale of devices purchased through Project Fi or the Google Store so everyone has an equal opportunity to purchase devices at a fair price. Many of the accounts suspended were created for the sole purpose of this scheme, but since some customers were not aware of these Terms of Sale and are now locked out of many Google services they rely on, we’re restoring access to these customers’ accounts.

Those who were banned should be getting their accounts restored soon. The moral of the story is probably to read the terms of service, have backups for your data, and maybe don't mess with companies that you store your entire digital life with. Provided your account isn't banned, you can always download all your Google data via Google Takeout.