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Comment by paulgb | Hacker News Reader

Brex has a feature where you can create vendor-specific cards, which I think is what's being referred to as the “privacy” feature. It makes it less disruptive to disable a card if a vendor leaks it, because it only interrupts payments to that vendor instead of having to update your card with every vendor.

I wasn't using that feature here, but it might be the case that the information that arrives at Google is just the issuer so they classify all Brex cards as “privacy” cards?

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Well that will just cement my lack of relationship with Google and ensure that my business goes to AWS.

Considering that many banks are doing this sort of service to protect you against data breaches, I can't see how this is actually an appropriate policy.

> Well that will just cement my lack of relationship with Google and ensure that my business goes to AWS.

How can you run your ads through AWS? Or a better question, what other ad networks that are comparable to what Google offers are there? Because to me it seems almost like a monopoly in regards to how impactful Google's services are - sadly they aren't regulated as such.

I'm assuming OP here was referencing Google's cloud services vs AWS. As in Google's abysmal behavior in regards to AdWords has spoiled them against using any other Google services.

It just feels like a massive risk to my business that they could take my business and essentially shut it down, and block any communications.

Surely they should be able to see that OP is an actual customer and not some sort of scammer.

This is true, although I don't manage our ads. But the amount of articles from folks on a weekly basis where they broke some unspoken rule that got them banned with no recourse and any relationship point of contact ghosting them is unsettling.

Unless these are actually all astroturfing stories by Microsoft and Amazon, I will stick to the companies who will actually speak to me if I have problems. They have internal communications, so my support ticket will actually reach other teams, and even working in a start up I can get conversations with finance and technical employees to get problems solved.

Google can have the advertising dollars since they are the 80 ton gorilla, but I can't see how anyone can trust them with anything critical to the running of your business.

> Google can have the advertising dollars since they are the 80 ton gorilla, but I can't see how anyone can trust them with anything critical to the running of your business.

Well that's my point - you might end up in a situation where you cannot use them for advertising and where you won't have many viable alternatives.

And it seems like Google will just get away with automation like that, either due to manual support just not being possible at that scale, or for other reasoning of theirs, without mechanisms in place for you to bypass the automation and actually get a solution for your problem, unless you operate at a certain scale.

Edit: closest alternatives that I found:

  - Microsoft Advertising: https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us/get-started/sign-up-with-microsoft-advertising
  - Amazon Ads: https://advertising.amazon.com/
  - Facebook Ads: https://www.facebook.com/business/ads
  - LinkedIn Ads: https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/ads
  - Instagram Ads: https://business.instagram.com/advertising

Though I'm curious about their respective market shares, say conversions per year as a percentage of all others put together.

Yes, and I was just implying that I will avoid them with anything where I have a viable alternative. That was all.

That seems an unreasonable size for a gorilla. I would advocate vivisection for science in such a case.

AWS does the same thing. My account was randomly blocked until they went through the documents I had to submit. IIRC, I had to use a different payment method too just like the OP.

The solution is to use multiple clouds. Switching from one SPOF to another doesn’t help.

I think you've just proved the point.

With AWS I know I can always get someone on the phone who can, or if they can't they will find someone who can, explain any billing or technical question.

I don't know your situation but unlike any of the Google stories, you found out that you needed to submit a document and then you gained access? Google refuse to tell people what the problem even is.

The article implies that the card issuer (Brex) triggered the fraud suspension and the comments above agree. It was the same issue I had with AWS (but with a different issuer) and they never told me that was the problem. The paperwork I had to submit was in addition to fixing the payment method.

The article does nothing of the sort.

Some comments in here imply that, but there is no evidence anywhere other than randoms on the internet. There isn't even any implication from those people that changing card providers at this point would resolve this.

> The paperwork I had to submit

Who told you to submit paperwork? It already sounds like you had a terrible but better experience.

It can be a hard problem to solve, but it is frustrating. Google ads has a threshold billing system in place (based on their public docs). What this means is they probably track how much each payment method has spent, and charge that payment method when it reaches $X.

My theory is below, but I have not researched or looked into virtual cards.

The problem with virtual cards or privacy cards: What's stopping a single physical card from having multiple virtual cards generated for it? So if someone had a card they knew could only be charged $100 and googles threshold is at $200, they could make 10 virtual cards and add the physical card resulting in 11 payment methods. Now they can theoretically get $2200 worth of ads (if all ad campaigns reached the threshold at the same moment).

In other words, fraud risk can go up significantly.

Yes, that’s correct. They are basing it on the card issuer.

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