After wife's death, Rocklin man grapples with accessing joint email with 2-step authentication tied to her old phone
A Rocklin man lost his wife this year. When he found himself locked out of their email account, he decided to ask CBS13 and the Call Kurtis consumer investigative team for help.
Two-step authentication is how we protect our accounts. But after hearing about what happened to Everett Kincer, you may want to think about how you have two-step authentication set up.
When Kincer's wife of 51 years, Luciana, passed away, he found himself locked out of his own email account over the cell number used for his two-step authentication.
But, Luciana Kincer's phone number was no longer valid. And, Everett Kincer's SBC Global email account is now part of AT&T Yahoo. He said after dozens of calls to AT&T to switch the two-step authentication to his own cell number, no one helped him.
"Every time I have to deal with them, then it brings up my wife's death," Kincer said. "It's terrible."
"For so many of those tech services, if you lose that second factor, you know, to put it plainly, you're screwed," said CNET's Nick Wolny. He added that most tech numbers do not have customer service numbers for you to call to get help. And, many of us use text messages for two-step authentication in which we receive a texted six-digit code to enter. But, it's only good if you have that cell phone in front of you.
"There are also authenticator apps that will do the same thing," Wolny said. "There's Google Authenticator. There are many others as well. The nice thing about an app is that you can have it on many different devices."
We reached out to Kincer's email company, AT&T. Right away, the company fixed the problem, saying, "We understand that when a death occurs in a family, a customer may not have all the information necessary to access an email account. We have safeguards to help keep the account secure, so we ask that customers call our care center for specialized assistance. This customer's experience did not meet our standards for how we serve customers and we have apologized."
Kincer's own email account is now no longer tied to his late wife's cell phone.
"I don't particularly like two-part authentication for anything," Kincer said.
AT&T claimed calling its customer care center for an issue after a death – like this one – should get you specialized assistance. But that didn't happen until we got involved.
If you have a consumer problem, CBS13 and the Call Kurtis consumer investigative team are here for you. Go to CBS13.com/CallKurtis and fill out our form.