[TenFour]

I suspect there are real cases of people being locked out despite having all their ducks in a row with regard to the recovery information, but in my experience having worked extensively in customer service there are often things that the consumer swears up and down are correct when in fact they are not. For example, was the original recovery phone number changed? Was the sign-up date noted correctly? Etc. Typically, even business customers get these things wrong and then are very angry when you don't give them full access to some account despite the fact that the cs tech on the line has no accurate information other than the person is swearing loudly at them on the phone or in all caps in an email. There are many, many scammers out there with exactly the same story as this probably legitimate person who is having a problem.

So, the real moral of the story is never, never, never create an email address, login, or other critical information without immediately storing it in one or more secure places, preferably a password vault of some sort. Plus, always secure your phone with a password and/or biometric login like a fingerprint. By the way, I also have all my emails either forwarded to another address and service, on another platform, or else synced using IMAP. The main service goes down and I am up and running on the backup service nearly instantly until I sort out what is wrong with the first service. Having done a lot of offshore sailing I know that you never rely on a single point of failure for critical systems.