Business Workspace Deactivated due to Ghost user - Support forcing me to double pay to fix a billing glitch (Case #09165339)

I have a Business Workspace (RK Bora) that is prepaid for an annual subscription for 2 seats, through March 2027. Somehow, a 3rd user got added to our plan. I am the primary user / admin, and I never authorized this. I had no email notifications, no admin access, and no intimation of who or what caused addition of this Ghost User.

The charge for this mystery 3rd seat failed. This single failed charge caused complete deactivation of the *entire* workspace. We are entirely locked out of both fully paid accounts and all our data, since 23 May 2026.

This seems like an unusual way to deal with such matters, to put it mildly. 2 prepaid users are deactivated completely, because of the mysterious way of handling user additions.

At this point, I am literally willing to just pay the outstanding balance (INR 12,486.39) for the extra seat just to get our access back. However the system won’t let me.

The invoice for the 3rd seat is marked “VOID”. When I try to reactivate the workspace through the dashboard, it completely ignores the fact that I already paid for two users for the year. It demands that I buy a brand new annual subscription from scratch for all 3 users.

Support’s response (Case #09165339):
I’ve been going back and forth with support for days. They acknowledge the situation but claim they cannot manually remove the unauthorized 3rd seat from their end.

They are telling me I have to make this massive double-payment upfront to reactivate, and only then will they “assess whether any refund eligibility or billing adjustment options MAY apply”.

How can one expect a customer to forfeit existing prepaid credit and double-pay approx. 700 USD based on a vague “maybe we’ll refund you”!?

Based on other conversations in the community, this seems to be a known issue of users getting added to workspaces without consent and even bugs wherein aliases / different login methods end up being treated as separate billed users.

I’ve seen mentions of manual interventions happening for other accounts. I am just hoping for a rational and reasonable outcome here.

Suggested options being:

  1. Manually remove the unauthorized 3rd seat so I can reactivate the 2 accounts I actually own.

  2. Give me a working payment link to pay *only* the difference for the 3rd seat.

  3. Cancel the workspace entirely and give me a prorated refund for the unused time on my two prepaid seats (23 May 2026 onwards).

Any advice or help escalating this would be appreciated. I just need the workspace back and a reasonable and just response from OpenAI here.

Thanks

@Prashant_Pardesi @OpenAI_Support requesting your intervention and manual review.

I’m at my wit’s end now. Shall I end up having to do a charge-back or proceed legal / consumer protection forum proceedings?

Hey Arbo, Apologies for the inconvenience this has caused. We will take this as feedback and improve our support experience. We can see that we have initiated a refund to you already. We will close this topic now. Thank yoU!