You’ve heard the horror stories of people having their Google Voice accounts suspended for violating one of the Acceptable Use policy rules. Maybe you’ve been suspended before and worked hard to get your account unsuspended and you don’t want to go through that again. You’ve come to the right place, the following points are my top ways to avoid getting your account suspended.
Understand what behaviors got you suspended in the first place.
Regardless of whether you’ve been suspended or just want to avoid the pain of a suspension consider taking time to read the Google Voice Acceptable Use Policy. It is important to understand what behaviors are allowed and which ones are not. Knowing upfront what is against usage policy is key to deciding how you will interact with your account.
Use a unique, secure password on your Google account
Please use good password creation best practices! Here is my advice:
- Don’t use a password that you use or have used on an account on another website. If that website is compromised now they have your Google Voice password.
- Consider using a passphrase rather than a password. Take 4 or 5 random words and string them together. Add in a few uppercase letters, a number, and symbol and you have a very secure password that will be very difficult to crack.
- Enable Two-factor authentication (TFA) on your account. Learn more here. Using two-factor authentication gives you an additional layer of security that protects your account from unauthorized access. If a hacker somehow gets your password, they won’t be able to log in unless they have the randomly generated code your TFA app uses.
Why is this important? Simply because, if a hacker can gain access to your Google account they will begin using it to send out email and text message SPAM. Eventually the SPAM detection systems will kick in and your account will be suspended.
Rate limit your text messaging
Let’s go ahead and get this out of the way, this post in no way is meant to promote getting around the Google Voice SPAM detection system. If you are sending SPAM, you deserve to have your account suspended, full stop.
Now that that’s out of the way. If you do find yourself needing to send a message to a group of people take your time. If you message 30 people in the span of a few minutes, that’s going to look awfully suspicious to the Google SPAM bots. Google purposely doesn’t publish the thresholds they use to detect SPAM, so there isn’t a good rule of thumb other than take it slow. During my research for this article I found several examples where individuals were sending 30+ text messages for legitimate purposes but got suspended anyway.
Do not send identical text messages to multiple people
Another way to get your self in trouble is sending the same identical message to a large number of people at once. One recommendation I have seen is to adjust your message by including the name of the recipient or modifying a part of the message so each text is different.
Be careful sending URLs
Including URLs in your mass text messages can also trigger the Google SPAM bots. SPAMers will often include links to a website whenever they send SMS SPAM. This appears to be a guaranteed way to have your account flagged for abuse.
Do not use Google Voice to dial in to a radio station contest!
Ask this person who found out the hard way: repeatedly hitting redial button will get you suspended pretty quickly. It’s likely that Google interprets this as harassing behavior or a TDOS attempt. Either way there are documented cases of people having their accounts suspended for this behavior.
Are you a small business owner considering using Google Voice for your business but have heard stories of people having their accounts suspended and not being able to make or receive calls for days or weeks? Consider reading our article on 5 things to consider before running your business with Google Voice
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