Comment by avery42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avery42 | Hacker News Reader

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From GCP docs [0]:

  Effect of ToS violations
  
  Google-wide disabled account
  
  In some cases a Google-wide account (which covers access to a variety of Google products like Google Photos, Google Play, Google Drive, and GCP) will be disabled for violations of a Google ToS, egregious policy violations, or as required by law. Owners of disabled Google accounts will not be able to access their Google Cloud resources until the account is reinstated. If an account is disabled, a notification is sent to the secondary email address provided during the signup process, if available. If a phone number is available, the user is notified via text message. The notification includes a link for appeal and recovery, where applicable.
  
  In order to regain access to their GCP resources, owners of disabled Google accounts will need to contact Google support and have their account re-enabled.
  
  To minimize the effect of an account being disabled on Google Cloud resources, we recommend that you add more than one owner to all resources. As long as there is at least one active owner, GCP resources will not be suspended due to the one of the owners being disabled.

Given the Google account horror stories that pop up every few months, seems risky if you're solo/only have one GCP owner.

[0]: https://cloud.google.com/resource-manager/docs/project-suspe...

Google will suspend entire accounts even if you have more than one owner.

A few years back, our business credit card was somehow stolen and used to buy Google Adwords. We disputed the charge with our bank. A day or two later, at 4am local time, our GCP account was suspended for fraud (presumably because the same, stolen, card was attached to that account). All instances were stopped and our service was brought to a halt.

We couldn’t contact Google Cloud support because our account was suspended. We had to go through our network to get our account re-instated. Pretty awful way to start our morning, to say the least.

On the link above there is a separate section for billing account suspensions and it seems to work how you described.

You can fairly easily swap billing accounts a project is using if you still have an organisation admin account that isn't suspended. I saw this risk coming at a previous company and tried to get them to treat billing accounts like any other important resource and go for redundancy, but the director could not see the value and our Google account manager denied the risk existed, luckily they have been more fortunate and this has not happened to them yet, although it did come close once with some issues with the payments.

Googler, opinions are my own.

We actually created a portal where you can report unknown charges to Google directly; https://payments.google.com/payments/unauthorizedtransaction...

Credit card companies tell you to work with a company before issuing a chargeback, as chargebacks are a last resort. The above form helps you keep you account active without being swept up in the chargeback process.

It's something we all want to keep improving. I'm hoping as SCA (strong customer authentication) rolls out across europe and maybe other countries pick it up, it should cut down on issues like this.

I believe that the "work with a company" guidance is for a dispute (e.g. you ordered something, but didn't get it or are otherwise unhappy) -- not an outright unauthorized purchase by someone other than the card holder. I don't see what most companies would do if you approached them in this case: you have no order number, no information about the purchase, nothing to return, etc.

The only logical thing to do in the case of a stolen or copied card is to contact the bank directly, so that the card can be canceled and fraudulent charges reversed.

Point taken. I thought of that same point after I wrote the above.

What happened once the account was reinstated and everything was up again? The customer service obviously sucked; did they acknowledge that and try to make it right?

That's why one should not use GCP for anything

AWS doesn't suspend your account if you chargeback your AWS charges?

Hold on while I go mine myself a ton of crypto coins.

AWS does not suspend your AWS account if there's an issue with you Amazon account. AWS reps are contactable and dare I say it capable of escalating and resolving issues.

The idea that someone could use a stolen credit card associated with an account, buy something on some Google service, have a chargeback processed as fraud and that would trigger Google's suspension of services on GCP is absurd.

> To minimize the effect of an account being disabled on Google Cloud resources, we recommend that you add more than one owner to all resources. As long as there is at least one active owner, GCP resources will not be suspended due to the one of the owners being disabled.

When even Google themselves is recommending gaming their system since they can't guarantee it won't screw you over, that should be a warning sign.

Having more than one owner is just basic common sense though. What if the single owner is hit by a literal bus?

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