Hello,
I’m creating this post because I’m hoping someone from OpenAI might be able to look into my case or at least confirm whether it can be reviewed again.
I’m also interested in hearing from anyone who experienced a similar sequence of events.
- I have been a ChatGPT Pro subscriber ($200/month) and have been using ChatGPT extensively for both my professional work and my personal life.
- I also added $5 to my API account months ago to experiment with the API for a Udemy course but barely used it afterwards.
- On the morning of the incident (June 23rd), I hadn’t actively used ChatGPT yet. Codex simply started automatically together with my Mac, as it normally does.
- When I later tried to access ChatGPT, I was greeted with an authentication error saying that my account had been deleted or deactivated.
- Shortly afterwards I found two deactivation emails in my spam folder:
- Case ID 1: C-EZn7epO481HA
- Case ID 2: C-ImF8kbjpWKkm
- One email referenced my user account, the other referenced my personal organization.
- One email also mentioned “previous warning”, but I never received any warning emails. I regularly check my inbox as well as my spam/junk folder.
- I immediately submitted an appeal for the first case, admittedly, with probably not enough information since I was quite frankly shocked this was happening, especially since I am not aware of any wrongdoing.
- The appeal was denied only a few hours later.
- The response simply stated that the decision would be upheld and that no further appeals would be considered for that case.
- It did not explain what kind of activity triggered the enforcement beyond the policy category itself.
After that I contacted OpenAI Support.
The Support answered my initial messages, and the one after that, but unfortunately only with automated answers again and referred me back to the appeal process. I have yet to hear back from that support ticket.
My current support ticket number is: 10417440
After gathering my thoughts over the following days, I submitted a second appeal for the second case with significantly more context and additional information. That appeal is currently pending.
To this day I genuinely do not know what activity could have caused this enforcement.
After thinking through everything I had done with the account, the only thing I can even imagine being misunderstood would be image generation using photos of myself.
Occasionally the image model rejected perfectly harmless editing requests, such as the pre-made prompts from OpenAI to test out the image generation, involving my own photos.
Other than that I honestly cannot identify anything that would explain the policy category mentioned in the deactivation email.
Since my account was deactivated I have come across an increasing number of posts here in the Community Forum, on X and on Reddit from users describing unexpected account deactivations around the same timeframe.
I understand that this does not necessarily mean all of these cases are related or caused by the same issue.
However, I also noticed OpenAI employees publicly acknowledging that some account-related issues are currently being investigated, which gave me hope that my case might deserve another look.
I would simply like to understand what type of activity resulted in my account being permanently deactivated, because I’m genuinely unaware of violating OpenAI’s Usage Policies.
If someone from OpenAI happens to read this, I would sincerely appreciate it if my second appeal could receive a careful review with the additional context I have provided.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
