Spanish Boy Racks Up €100K Bill, Google Cancels The Charge | Hacker News Reader

Spanish Boy Racks Up €100K Bill, Google Cancels The Charge

freshasfuck.net

85 pointsproofmaster53 comments

In Austria, you are not contractually capable until you are 14, and from 14-18 you are so only in a limited fashion, as allowed by the assets available to you.

Probably Spain has similar laws (age of majority is 18 in Spain), making the whole AdWords contract invalid. So there would not have been any way for Google to get the money.

So this most likely wasn't anything 'charitable' done by Google, just the law.

Nothing to see here, move along...

Yes and they (and other companies) don't exactly have the best record on this type of thing.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2602255/legal/google-to...

You just gave me a good idea to save a lot of money in ads: Mechanical Turk for kids... just kidding!

Yeah back to the 19th century we go. People love old school stuff, so VCs will probably fund the shit out of it :p

What happened to the original title? This one makes it sound like a bizarre forgery story.

Agreed.

I read the title as "spanish boy counterfeits a 100,000 Euro bill and tries to pay Google with it".

I think it got edited on the website in the meantime. I just copied the original one...

Where are you from that "racks up" means "counterfeits" and not "accumulates"?

The original title was "Spanish boy Makes 100,000 Euro bill".

FWIW: This confused me as well

I spend about $20k/mo with Adwords and, at least in the US, Google charges every $500. I'll often have multiple charges from them on my card per day during the week. I find it very annoying to have all of these small charges to review on our expense report and asked that they increase the threshold and they refused.

I've never not paid a bill (it's automatic), but I find it extremely hard to believe that once the payment failed at 500 Euro they would allow the account to accrue 99,500 Euro more in charges. That is assuming they have a similar threshold to charge where this user was.

So, you can get away with blowing >$100k on adwords and nobody bats an eye (he was auto-billed), but on AWS I can't spin up more than a few elastic IPs or EBS volumes without going through verification hoops :)

I heard that you can owe money to Facebook as well. Recently a story broke out that a page got removed because they didn't pay 20k euros for advertisement. I had a paid ad once and got billed 2 months later...

Yes, but you have to be a teenager with very crappy videos about your music group. Probably with better quality videos or being over 18 wouldn't have the same consequences from Google.

Agreed, if anything, this story is interesting because it shows that Google will let brand new customers go from 0 to 100 k$ without any checking!

I really thought I had to add a credit card before I could use adwords,and that they charge at the end of the first month.

I feel like there's something missing from this story.

No the story, is bullshit. You will get charged the first 250$, after that it will be increased to 500$. And only upped once the payment is complete. This continues for a few more steps. So you can't spend 100K on a new account. This entire story just sounds like pure BS. Google has a LOT of stuff against fraud, especially on it ads business. As it's the core ...

He was being billed from his savings account. It was only when the threshold increased (which Google increases after some time) that the bank raised the warning. (Source: The Register)

Ok, this explains it. Thanks!

Big surprise, a site named "freshasfuck" is not a really good source for news!

Amazon are supposedly good about refunding accidents too.

1. Get kids to open AdWords accounts for you

2. Spend 100k on each on affiliate marketing. Even a non optimized campaign on a good offer is still going to bring in 5 figures

3. ??????

4. Profit

They'd presumably be advertising your services though (not the kids website). Easier to establish fraud.

Not your services, affiliate marketing. Much harder to determine who got the payout.

Seems risky still, $100k risk for n% of $100k payout. They might say they'd waive it if you can show the advertised accounts are in the kids name, and that the kid refunds all the money from their account.

In the original artcile, the ad being run was for his band. Doubt he made any money at all.

The fact that there was payout at all indicates something suspicious. This was just crappy promotions for youtube videos owned by the same person.

99% bots, 1% of stupid questions. No profit. Google Ads sucks.

Yeah, then get caught and police is involved since you are using kids. You probably could go to prison for that .

3. Use the press to make Google look evil.

Fixed that for you ;)

5. Donate profit to charity.

The circle of life is complete.

So, someone in Google's accounting department handled a mistake in a mature and responsible way. Good on them.

I guess they don't want the public spotlight into a process that allows a minor to enter into an arbitrarily expensive contractual relation without any form of ID or parental consent.

They should have charged the idiot parents who gave him access to their bank account. But they did not only in order to save face and not be portrayed as an evil corporation by the media.

There are no mistakes here. The idiot kid wanted publicity at any cost, the idiot parents want to give the kid everything he wants and Google doesn't want any more hostile propaganda in Europe.

The boy had his own bank account. It was a joint account with his parents so his parents were notified of the charges.

Something definitely smells out of place here.

I believe the AdWords policies vary from country to country (and from time to time) but the last I checked (2015), here in India, you had to have at least one verifiable payment method (card/bank account) in order to even activate an AdWords account, leave alone the matter of running up a balance of Euro 100,000.

So how did a 12 y-o manage to do that?

The story as reported on bbc radio 4 last night said his parents let him add some bank details - either their own or some other account like a trust fund that needed their consent.

I wasn't really listening enough to remember the exact details but it rang true enough for me not to question it. Other than his parents being very trusting or very naive, of course?

/More detail http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37571304/boy-racks-up-...

"A savings account had been opened in the boy's name and he used those details when signing up for AdWords."

Where I live, you can get a bank card (not credit) as a teenager. But you are unable to put yourself in debt. So you can use the card to buy stuff, but companies should be wary of using the card details to verify future purchases.

In this case, if you pay for AdWords credit up front and then spend them, the company is fine. But if they charge a bill after the fact, the contract allowing those charges wouldn't be legal, and that's the responsibility of the professional part.

To me, the problem is that all this kid really did is hike up the bid price of competitive keywords, therefore earning more money for Google. I have the same issue with them giving away money for trials, or giving thousands to non-profits.

It's gaming their own system from within -- if someone is given money to splurge on Adwords, they will pour it into really competitive keywords without really caring about the return, jacking up the price for those who are paying real money.

It might sound altruistic, but there is a pretty real benefit for Google.

If my experience at a nonprofit is a guide they'll actually call endless meetings to talk about the AdWords and then never get around to using them.

Meaning, the nonprofit will call for meeting with adwords and never actually use them?

No, they'll call meetings internally to discuss how to use the AdWords and never decide anything or act on it.

There's so many things wrong with what you said.

A) It's not true that people "splurge" it on adwords. Adwords gives you a finite amount, so you have an interest in being as efficient as possible, at least if you care about your cause. Also, the effect on bid pressure is greater if you bid the same as the nr 1 bidder than if you "splurge it" by bidding $100/click, see D)

B) trials are like £75. Once you spend it, it's gone. You can't get more. It's not gonna bankrupt your the competitors.

C) Non-profits can't "pour it into really competitive keywords". They're limited in what they can do, they can't go bid on life insurance with google's money. They're also limited to a maximum bid of $2/click.

D) Regarding jacking up the price being a real benefit for google... This one is more complicated but you can't be sure without looking at the numbers. Because on the one hand you increase competition, but on the other google only get actual revenue from N-1 ad slots.

You're just guessing.

A spanish source: http://www.elcomercio.com/tendencias/deuda-google-nino-publi...

12 years old kid is punished to stay at home, he decides to be a famous youtuber and somehow he ends up giving his bank account. Fist invoices are low, after one month with a 19k invoice the bank notifies the parents and the parents block all the invoices.

That's not Spanish, that's from Ecuador.

It's still Spanish.

I thought he said "Spanish" meaning "a local source", not "a source in a language other than English"

How is it okay that so many services don't come with a clear, configurable, default-low cost accrual cap?

Heck, Comcast is rolling out unlimited* potential liability if you go over without pre-purchasing a $50 insurance policy.

* Given bandwidth constraints, maybe it's only $6500/mo or so. Still.

Comcast is rolling out unlimited potential liability

No, that's not true. The maximum additional liability is $200.

From the article linked to in the recent discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663935

The third time it's exceeded within a 12 month period, however, the "courtesy months" go away and users will be charged $10 for an additional 50GB of data, which will continue happening to a limit of $200 per month. If you want unlimited data access, you can buy it up front, for an additional $50 per month over your current internet bill.

What I don't understand is how they let the bill go unpaid for so long. Seems like ripe avenue for spammers to get free advertising.

Of course it's the right decision, but doesn't it make a mockery of some fundamental philosophy of the market mechanisms behind Google AdWords that it can be cancelled?

Nothing that can't be fixed with a small army of clickbots.

What do you mean? No sellers got stiffed by this cancellation, if this happens it's Google that foots the bill (minus its own share).

'mom please give me 100 000 euros, I messed up a bit..'

Now this is growth hacking.

Next growth hacking scheme?

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