We are seeking urgent help with a service account that has been suspended, as we have no direct channel to appeal this decision.
Summary of the Issue: Our service account ( .iam.gserviceaccount.com ) has been suspended. All files in Google Drive owned by this account are now inaccessible.
Technical Details:
When attempting to use the service account to perform an action (e.g., sharing a file), we now receive the following specific error:
<HttpError 400 when requesting https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v3/files/[…]/permissions? […] returned “Bad Request. User message: “You cannot share this item because it has been flagged as inappropriate.””. Details: “[{‘message’: ‘Bad Request. User message: “You cannot share this item because it has been flagged as inappropriate.”’, ‘domain’: ‘global’, ‘reason’: ‘abusiveContentRestriction’}]”>
Context:
This service account is part of an automated workflow for a legitimate business purpose. The project is managed by a personal Google Account (a...@gmail.com), which does not have access to a paid Google Cloud support plan.
What We Have Tried: We contacted Google One support, but they confirmed they are unable to assist with Google Cloud service accounts.
We have checked Cloud Audit Logs and see no unusual delete activity originating from our side.
We are unable to file a technical support case or appeal directly via the Google Cloud console due to our account type.
Our Request:
Could a community manager or Google employee please forward this case internally to the appropriate Trust & Safety / Compliance team for review? We need to:
Understand the reason for the suspension.
Formally appeal the abusiveContentRestriction.
Find a path to restore access to our critical data.
The error message, “You cannot share this item because it has been flagged as inappropriate”, indicates a violation of Google’s content or acceptable use policies related to automated content distribution.
In your case, to have this issue escalated and reviewed, you should file an appeal as outlined in the Policy Violations FAQ, making sure to follow the instructions provided.
Was this helpful? If so, please accept this answer as “Solution”. If you need additional assistance, reply here within 2 business days and I’ll be happy to help.
Unfortunately, the linked FAQ and the standard appeal process it outlines are not applicable to our situation. This is the core of the problem, and it has placed us in an “appeal gap.”
To clarify why we cannot follow the standard process, here is a point-by-point breakdown:
No Project Suspension: Our GCP Project (alluma, ID: 966209932422) is fully active and has not received any warning or suspension notice.
No “Appeals” Page: Because the project itself is not flagged as suspended, the “Appeals” page in the Google Cloud Console is not available to us. There is nothing there for us to appeal.
No Warning Emails: We have received no emails regarding a policy violation or suspension for this project or service account.
The issue appears to be a functional restriction placed directly on the Service Account identity (alluma-drive-01@…), not a formal suspension of the parent GCP Project. The standard appeal process only seems to trigger for project-level events.
You mentioned that if we need additional assistance, we should reply here. We are now formally requesting that additional assistance.
Given that the standard appeal process is unavailable to us, could you please escalate this case internally to a team that can investigate a restriction on a service account identity directly? We have exhausted all self-service and standard support avenues.
Our public issue tracker case for this is 428869877.
Following up on this thread for the benefit of the community and to provide a conclusion.
The situation escalated shortly after my last post: a second service account, this time under our paid Google Workspace account, was suspended in the exact same manner.
This event, however, finally unlocked a path to official support. We were able to open Google Workspace Support Case 61039697.
I can now report a positive development: after submitting our detailed analysis to the support case, access to all inaccessible files on both accounts has been restored.
We are still awaiting a formal root cause analysis from the support team to understand why this happened and how to prevent it in the future.
Thank you to those who looked at this. We will be tracking the final resolution via our official support case. This thread can be considered closed.