There's a support channel for appeals? Not hardly.
As I mentioned in my anti-Google Checkout article on Slash7 (which you commented on), not only has Google attempted to steal money from me by closing my Checkout account, but my husband lost over $2,000 of Adsense money when his account was arbitrarily closed.
He's the author of Scriptaculous - and the ads were on the Scriptaculous site - a totally innocent open source contributor.
So, support money was effectively stolen from a popular open source project.
Of course he appealed.
And he never heard back.
The commenter above is right: One-off help for those who are able to make a lot of noise, and hurt Google's image, is not enough. It got me my Checkout account back, and it will probably get the OP's Adsense account back.
But my husband never made a public fuss, and so of course all his attempts to reach out to Google were completely ignored.
Until there's a system in place other than "be famous and make noise," nobody should trust Google with their money, in any way.
Anyone who's interested in more back story (and my recommendations for improving the Google experience), these are the two articles I wrote:
If you really mean that they closed your husband's account and walked away with money they owed you, then this seems like exactly what the legal system is made for. (Though I'd expect them to settle rather than actually go to court, unless they think you're lying outright.)
Well, they seem to have come out $2000 ahead on this one. Perhaps they ran the math and realized "the legal system" was intimidating enough that to deter most who would be forced to look to it for help.
To clarify: I was not in the least suggesting that the fact that it might be possible to get your money back from Google by suing them means that Google haven't failed. I was suggesting that it might be a more effective way of getting them to take notice than going through their (clearly rather useless) support channels and blogging about it.
He lives in Austria. Which legal system? And even if it was in the US, you'd be very hard-pressed - as a professional - to justify going through the time and effort required, even in small claims court, for $2k.
For Google, it is a win/win/win situation... until people holler about it.
If you actually expected them to fight it all the way, that might be true. I suspect, though, that "Google found guilty of stealing customer's money" would be an unpalatable enough headline that they'd settle pretty quickly once the threat was made.
But yeah, not being in a country where Google has enough presence to bring them under its jurisdiction could be a problem.
That dude who was on the HuffPost, who sued them for his $700 in missing Adsense money... they fought him in small claims court, even tho their representative was unable to prove a case, they appealed and are dragging it out.
As I mentioned in my anti-Google Checkout article on Slash7 (which you commented on), not only has Google attempted to steal money from me by closing my Checkout account, but my husband lost over $2,000 of Adsense money when his account was arbitrarily closed.
He's the author of Scriptaculous - and the ads were on the Scriptaculous site - a totally innocent open source contributor.
So, support money was effectively stolen from a popular open source project.
Of course he appealed.
And he never heard back.
The commenter above is right: One-off help for those who are able to make a lot of noise, and hurt Google's image, is not enough. It got me my Checkout account back, and it will probably get the OP's Adsense account back.
But my husband never made a public fuss, and so of course all his attempts to reach out to Google were completely ignored.
Until there's a system in place other than "be famous and make noise," nobody should trust Google with their money, in any way.
Anyone who's interested in more back story (and my recommendations for improving the Google experience), these are the two articles I wrote:
http://slash7.com/articles/2009/3/26/google-is-evil-worse-th...
http://slash7.com/articles/2009/3/28/google-checkout-still-u...