Be warned before you do business with google

unfair supension of adwords account

[joobern]

The following event happened to me and is a true story. I was advertising with Google for a couple of years now without ever any problems. Then I wanted to open a further ad account for a special new marketing leg of my company, unfortunately I have many staff working on these accounts so in order to keep mistakes from happening I open a new account for each new marketing campaign / staff section I have. But all accounts are always registered under my name and paid for with my credit card. Suddenly my accounts were suspended and under investigation by Google specialists. Then suddenly they closed everything and now want to make me liable for money I don't owe them on a account which is in arrears which was never my account to begin with and has nothing to do with me whatsoever. And if I wish to continue using Adwords I need to settle this account first? This account they are speaking of has nothing to do with me? And their team of specialist investigated the whole thing and came up with the brilliant conclusion that I have to pay somebody else's debt or contact the person who made the debt in first place and try to make him settle the account prior to me being able to continue advertising? And they then said that it is sensitive information and they cannot give me any further information?

It turned out that the website URL's I wanted to market in my new account where once marketed by another company that still owes Google money. So I contacted this company, even though it is not my job to do debt collecting for Google, and asked them if they could settle. However the other company is not willing to settle these amounts since they claim that Google has shut down their accounts unfairly and that even if they did settle the account it would be of no use since Google is not willing to reopen the account again, which I understand, why pay if you getting nothing for it.

So far nothing could be done about this situation and I lost an important income stream and quite a bit of prepaid money which they are obviously not going to give back to me. They closed all my accounts even though my payment history is immaculate. I wrote it off as a very bad experience and eye opener for now. I also uninstalled Google chrome instantly thereafter since I strongly feel that this browser is a total invasion of privacy and went back to my good old Internet Explorer.

However it is my duty to warn everybody out there, think twice before you go into business with Google, they can destroy your income stream with the click of the button, and their terms and conditions actually also provide room for this. Do be very careful and trust me, don't think for a moment you can win against them.

But I am planning to take legal action. Any advice on this matter will be appreciated.

[BillyS]

BillyS, does this mean you currently work for Google or did in the past....or did i read the response incorrectly.

I don't work for Google; I'm just stating I've worked in the collections area before. The policies and procedures are pretty standard in that industry. Everyone has the same objective (reduce write-off), so they share best practices. Deferred payment arrangements, partial payments…

[piatkow]

As passing thought on bringing lawyers in.
When I worked for a bank in the dim and distant past most disputes were resolved amicably by discussion between customer and manager, normally with some form of ex gratia settlement on our part. Once in a while a customer would decide that the best route would be to get his lawyer to send a letter instead. When that happened the letter was forwarded staight to the legal department who responded purely on the letter of the law.

[sailorjwd]

Google seems to be accusing you of a couple of illegal actions - fraud amoung them. Is it possible to get a historical domain ownership report for that domain and send the report to google? I assume this would demonstrate that you did not own the domain when Bob incurred the debt.

But then again, you are really Bob so nothing matters :(

I'm happily in my 4th month of adwords recovery. No more adwords for me.

[doubtmaster]

It is based on our experience that we give an opinion about something. In this case, your bad experience with G has lead to the bad opinion about them.

However sometimes it may not be the company's policy that would have caused all the problem but rather goofing up by the customer service agent that we are dealing with.

Recently I ended up closing web hosting with Yahoo because the particular executive did not have proper knowledge about domain and hosting and renewal. The unfortunate part was this particular agent was assigned for me, so I could not talk with some one else explaining that my domain could be renewed. The result, Yahoo lost one customer.

Similarly, the particular agent who is attending to you may be the lousy guy who is not happy with what he is getting paid or just plain careless. So he might have put not have done proper background checking or research on the url and details provided.

Instead of going into legal stuff, you can easily try this. Just create a completely new adword account through someone else you know, use the same url and see what happens. It would be clear if the problem is with url or the support team. It should be made in such a way that in no other way should that be associated with you.

Compared with the cost of legal hassles, this might help you know where the problem is at a more cheaper rate.

[bwnbwn]

Actually right now I have someone running adwords ads for my domain. This has been going on for over a year now. The ads are only running in content and are still going on today.

I did email Google to make sure someone wasn't trying to get me banned or doing something under a hacked account. I was able to get Google to investigate and was told it looks fine they don't know why someone is spending money to send traffic to my website, but it all looks legit.

Only thing I can think of is I helped someone out and they are repaying me in a way I will never know.

[OddDog]

Talk to your account manager.

If you made payment via a credit card, pull the pament back.

In my experience, once you get throught to a real human being, rather than a canned email response, Google is very reasonable. It can be tough to make that break into the human circle though.

[jdaniel]

Google has treated you unfairly, their decision has effected your income so I think they are totally liable.

They might of treated unfairly, but as they see it(arrogance) you had nothing before using google adwords and if you abuse their playground you will get kicked out to having nothing again.

That sucks about the second URL having baggage and good to know for future reference. I usually recommend using 2 different domain names that are similarily close if possible. 1 for adwords and 1 for SEO purposes.