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.
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Contact Info
Email: nico@omg.lol
GitHub (banned acct): nicoandmee
StackOverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/users/6934588/nico-mee
Keybase: https://keybase.io/nicomee
Personal Website: https://nicomee.com/
Regardless, hopefully a valuable lesson in mirroring public contributions to other source control systems (Gitlab, Codeberg, etc.) is learned.
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.
I would even be willing to freeze my GitHub in its current state, restoring it but not allowing any further activity on it. I just want the record of to be able to say, "Hey, I fixed this issue in node-tar" or "I fixed this issue in Puppeteer Extra". Note: Edited OP to include my SO.
As a developer who's still early in their career, my hope is that someone will see this, understand the existential weight of having all that work disappear, and be sympathetic to a request for a second chance.