Banned By A Machine. Appeals Answered By A Machine Too.
In two days, paying ChatGPT and Codex users posted the same story again and again: an account flagged for cyber abuse, recidivism or repeated violations, an appeal rejected fast, and a support chat that never reaches a person.
A locked door, shown for illustration. Photo: Annatsach, CC BY SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
If you pay OpenAI every month, you'd hope that losing your account would at least involve a person reading what you did. Over the last two days, a run of paying users posted that it didn't work that way for them.
A developer, a $200 plan and 62,500 credits
Early Sunday, a developer who builds Android apps and runs a small company in Pakistan posted on r/OpenAI that their account was deactivated for "Cyber Abuse" while they were building a remote ADB support tool, the kind a support team uses to help a customer set up a phone with that customer's permission. Their questions, they wrote, were "about ADB, remote connections and networking. Ordinary developer work."
The appeal "was rejected with no explanation, and the reply said no further appeals would be considered." Support closed the case. After they filed OpenAI's Informal Dispute Resolution form, an agent told them to appeal again, even though the appeal was already closed. They say they pay $200 a month and hold 62,500 credits they can no longer reach. "At no point did a person look at what I was actually building," they wrote.
"Recidivism" for one old free account
On Saturday evening, another r/OpenAI user posted that their main paid account was banned for "Recidivism." They said they'd once had a single free account banned, barely used it, and moved on. They appealed, and "in one hour they perma-banned my account, and no more appeals would be processed." Worse, they wrote, "I have no way to even stop the recurring payments." When they gave the support bot the banned account's email, "it just stops the conversation."
On r/ChatGPTcomplaints, someone else wrote on Saturday that an email told them their account was deactivated for "repeated violations" even though they'd "used ChatGPT for normal personal purposes."
Flagged for doing what OpenAI asked
The cyber flags aren't limited to bans. On Saturday a security professional with approved OpenAI Daybreak Blue access, a program meant for authorized security work, posted that they got a "Cyber Exploitation" warning. The strange part: "I didn't even use ChatGPT or Codex today, so I don't know which activity actually triggered the warning or when it occurred."
And on r/OpenAIDev, a developer preparing a plugin for ChatGPT's own review process said Codex gave them a list of test prompts to run and record for the review team. The last three probed the plugin's privacy limits on purpose. ChatGPT stopped the session, and a few hours later they got an email saying the account had been flagged for "Cyber Abuse." In their words, "I basically got a policy warning for running the tests I was asked to run."
What to do if it happens to you
Before anything else, export your data while you still can, screenshot the email and every support reply, and cancel billing through your app store or card issuer if the account itself is locked. Then ask, in writing, for a human review. Every person above asked for the same thing.
Sources: r/OpenAI, October 4; r/OpenAI, October 3; r/ChatGPTcomplaints, October 3; r/OpenAI, October 3; r/OpenAIDev, October 3.