It’s trivial to make a new developer account and release similar products, so as an App Store you can do things like looking for similarities between new apps and banned apps to root out simple “change of ownership” schemes like this.
Google can’t afford to take this lightly, games with fraudulent ad clicks can generate (i.e. steal) millions of dollars in ad spend from businesses who think they are getting legitimate impressions.
OP's story isn't remotely okay. Fraud is a complicated issue. Here's what's uncomplicated: OP are not frauds. Here's what uncomplicated: Google reneged on a (very one-sided) contract, and destroyed a business. Here's a really simple one: Google is an abusive monopoly.
Yeah, the guy who commented on HN is the oppressor. lol
According to OP -- do you have firmer evidence of this than their own say-so?
You think it's reasonable to ban an entire company because one of their employees committed ad fraud at a previous job?
Bans should be limited in time and scale.
This really must be regulated, Google and co should not be able to lock you out of your digital identity.
As far as I can tell, this blog post is only mentioning the company's Android developer account being disabled. It in fact shows evidence that other access to the account is still available (e.g. screenshots from the account security checkup tool, which wouldn't be accessible if the whole account was disabled). This does seem limited in scale.
(Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on anything related to this.)
For all we know it could be the virus attack that lead to Googles decision.
This will naturally make their jobs a whole lot harder, but currently they're just externalizing their costs onto people like in this article.
Just like all the recent articles pointing out that "identity theft" is a term offloading incompetence of the companies onto the individual.
We need to stop putting up with this shit.
It's frighteningly common in big tech. Amazon is known for banning people for life because someone else with the same address returned too many items. Pick your roommates carefully I guess.