Gh Account Permabanned – Help?

[nicomeemes]

I'm reaching out to the HN community because I've just lost something that can't be recreated: my entire GitHub history since I was 14 years old.

What happened?

My account was permanently banned without warning. After fighting through support tickets, the suspected culprit is a chargeback related to GitHub Copilot that occurred during a fraud dispute on my credit card.

When fraudulent charges were reversed, GitHub Copilot charges apparently went with them – and GitHub's automated system interpreted this as intentional fraud.

I started in infosec at 14 – hacking, building tools, contributing to open source on GitHub. As a teenager, I contributed work that was featured at DEFCON. I'm still early in my career, and I've been banking on something crucial: that real, tangible contributions to open-source projects would speak louder than any resume ever could. Those contributions were my resume. They were proof of work – thousands of commits, security tools, pull requests, issues, and collaborations that showed what I could actually build and how I work with others. All of that is now gone (unless you count the BigQuery archives...) Not suspended. Just... inaccessible.

The broader issue: For young developers and security researchers like me, GitHub contributions are our professional credibility. We don't have decades of corporate experience or impressive job titles. We have public code, meaningful contributions, security research, and a history of shipping. When that disappears overnight due to a banking mishap during a fraud dispute, it's devestating.

A fraudulent charge triggered a card cancellation In the dispute process, legitimate charges (including GitHub Copilot) were reversed GitHub's system flagged this as abuse and permanently banned the account No warning. No appeal process. No way to distinguish fraud victims from bad actors.

If anyone has connections at GitHub who can review this with human judgment, please reach out. I am desperate for a 2nd chance. If you've successfully navigated a similar situation, let me know.

I understand platforms need to combat fraud, but there has to be room for nuance. A mistaken reversal during a legitimate fraud dispute shouldn't permanently erase years of work. I'm ready to immediately settle any disputed charges and provide whatever documentation is needed – but I can't even get to a human who can evaluate the situation.

How You Can Help

If anyone has connections at GitHub who can review this with human judgment, please reach out. I am desperate for a 2nd chance. If you've successfully navigated a similar situation, let me know.

I understand platforms need to combat fraud, but there has to be room for nuance. A mistaken reversal during a legitimate fraud dispute shouldn't permanently erase years of work. I'm ready to immediately settle any disputed charges and provide whatever documentation is needed – but I can't even get to a human who can evaluate the situation.

---

Contact Info

Email: [e-mail]

GitHub (banned acct): nicoandmee

StackOverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/users/6934588/nico-mee

Keybase: https://keybase.io/nicomee

Personal Website: https://nicomee.com/

[flamesofphx]

Doubt it's a single chargeback that did that, though it's probably what got there attention to your account. Probably something else (A bad infosec tool copy/modification to search for something like SS# patterns). Even from a security point of view I would see your email and add points for suspected fraud. What do you think and employer would think to if they saw an email like that (Minor drug reference @ omg.lol)? There is a lot of tools in infosec if they see it they would be against term of services (Some that you would not think of either)... Then further I would look for social media history too following, an incident on appeal (That's not just a recursive rejection) and see responses from you getting defensive as seen in the beginning of this thread. It's not professional behavior simply put.

[amwet]

GitHub isn’t his employer, what are you talking about?

[DetectDefect]

Missing from this heartfelt plea is any indication of what code you were working on before the ban, or why you are so certain it was a result of credit card activities. We only get your side of the story - what does Github support actually tell you?

Regardless, hopefully a valuable lesson in mirroring public contributions to other source control systems (Gitlab, Codeberg, etc.) is learned.

[nicomeemes]

As far as code goes, I never contributed to anything even remotely malicious. I worked primarily on obscure scraping problems related to Puppeteer and Playwright. I built some libraries for that I published on NPM, but at no point did I ever contribute or use GitHub in any capacity for anything malicious. I am a hundred percent certain of this, and this is why I am inclined to the other explanation which seems to make more sense. I would love to get their side of the story. The problem is the rules prohibit creating a new account to discuss the old account being banned without warning. So this sort of kneecaps any potential conversation. Nonetheless, I have broken the rules, I guess, and created a new account and tried to establish some contact, but my ticket doesn't get any responses and based on my research it doesn't seem like it will.

Point taken about mirroring to Codeberg (or sr.ht), and this is something I was already planning on doing in terms of migration. At the same time, if there was any way to restore my GitHub, that would certainly simplify all of my next steps.

More than my own repos, I'm mainly concerned about my contributions to others. I've gotten hired twice just by someone contacting me from an issue that I had fixed on a GitHub discussion and that's no longer there.

[the__alchemist]

This reads like victim-blaming.