a little backstory.
My mom died earlier this year in a drunk driving accident and my family needs to get into her google account. The thing is, she had 2 factor authentication, the phone and SIM card that it was linked to were destroyed in the accident. there are almost certainly important things in the Google account that need to be settled given that she was the one running the entire household after my dad’s stroke. I did some googling and the best I could get regarding bypassing the 2FA was to have a trusted device to log in with, but the only device that could have been was her laptop that I factory reset for college after her death. I later factory reset it a second time after dropping out so it could be used to handle bills and shopping. I haven’t tried to log in with this laptop yet because I assumed that it’s no longer trusted by Google.
bit of a shot in the dark and I’m just about certain there’s actually nothing I can do, but I’d like to get a few more eyes on this nonetheless.
Sorry about your loss.
I would start by contacting that email company’s tech support and asking if there’s alternative way to verify or bypass 2fa, and explain the situation.
As for the laptop, its already wiped so it won’t be so easy to retrieve any data. Its possible you can have data scraped with a data recovery company, but no guarantees.
Best of luck. Take time to heal.