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Locked Out While Upgrading Your Gmail Call Phone? Try This Fix

By Damien Oh

For those who are looking for a free/cheap ways to make international call, Google has recently released the Gmail Call Phone feature that you can use to make phone call to any numbers in the World in your Gmail. I believe that most of you will have already played with it, and some of you (who are not located in the United States) might have even locked your account accidentally.

For those who are not aware of the incident, if you are not located in United States, and you click the “Upgrade your account” in the Google Voice dashboard, you will get the error message ”Google Voice is not available in your country”.

gmail-callphone-upgrade-account

gmail-callphone-locked

From then on, you won’t be able to get to the Google voice dashboard or add credit to your Gmail CallPhone. Effectively, you are locked out from using the call services.

Luckily there is an easy way to fix this. All we need to do is to change our machine to an USA IP address and login to Google voice to cancel the upgrade. Here’s the steps:

In Windows/Mac:

1. Download and install Hotspot shield.

2. Run Hotspot shield

3. Open your browser and login to your Gmail account

4. Open another tab and go to https://www.google.com/voice/. Instead of the “Google Voice Unavailable” error message, you will now be prompted to setup Google voice.

We are not going to setup Google Voice since it is not available outside of USA yet, so what you need to do now is to click on the link “Cancel Your Upgrade”.

gmail-callphone-cancel-upgrade

That’s it. Your account is unlocked. You can access your Google voice dashboard and add credit to your account.

In Linux

Since Hotspot Shield is not available for Linux, we have to use alternative method to connect to USA IP address.

One of the alternative is to connect to a remote IP using SSH. Once you are connected to the remote address, you can follow the same steps above to cancel your upgrade.

Does this method works for you? Let us know if you know of other ways to connect to a US IP address.

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Damien Oh Avatar
Damien Oh
Damien Oh started writing tech articles since 2007 and has over 10 years of experience in the tech industry. He is proficient in Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS, and worked as a part-time WordPress Developer. He is currently the owner and Editor-in-Chief of Make Tech Easier.

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