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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotal but I administrated a small site a while ago that tried to monetize it's modest traffic with google Adsense. Everything was fine until we tried to "cash out" - google is fine taking your business until then, at which point you have to go through a completely automated "ID verification" process, and if you fail once, it's pretty much GG. We couldn't get "verified," and lost several thousand dollars that was in that account, and abandoned the service shortly thereafter.

If you look at Adsense reviews online there are hundreds if not thousands of similar stories. Straight up theft.

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Yup! Google did this to me. I ran a forum and decided to put ads on it, which they were happy to do. When I attempted to cash out they accused me of committing clickfraud and refused to pay out. There was no way to appeal.

This is why, to this day, none of the businesses or startups I've been involved with have used Google products if we can avoid it. At the startup I was a founding engineer for we hosted on AWS despite Google's venture fund being one of our investors. Google's products just can't be trusted.

I originally started using ad blockers because of the number of people being accused of clicking their own ads. Idk how they can be sure their systems are working properly when it's basically impossible to appeal and show that it's gone wrong.

> When I attempted to cash out they accused me of committing clickfraud and refused to pay out. There was no way to appeal.

I'm guessing that you didn't see a lawsuit or small-claims suit as worthwhile, given the amount of money involved?

If Google is doing this to a large number of relatively small-value accounts, maybe it would be reasonable for a class-action suit. IANAL, but I'm guessing Google would do anything to avoid a discovery process regarding this.

>maybe it would be reasonable for a class-action suit

When you sign up for AdSense, you agree to arbitrate disputes.

not working out very well for twitter

That doesn't mean they can take your money for no reason.

I didn’t say it does.

This happened to me as well, I started a forum in college and put Adsense on it; Google accused my account of click fraud, and froze it, keeping all of the ad money. I tried to find ways to appeal, and they didn't care. They could have at least had a 3-strike rule to give you resources to prevent fraud if it were occurring, and an appeal process. The account is frozen to this day (almost 20 years later), and since Google has a monopoly on ads...it was impossible to put anything else up. There were a few, but they were mostly all scammy. I then had some luck with others, and slowly Google bought them all. Microsoft and Yahoo tried to launch competitors but both failed. Google is an ad monopoly, even Microsoft runs Google ads on MSN.

> google is fine taking your business until

That's similar to how insurance companies operate in US. They'd take in customers, let those customers pay for the insurance every month, happily taking their money. But then, if there were any significant claims filed, they'd go combing through a person's medical history, application form mistakes, etc, and find an excuse to kick them out of the plan. "Oh, you didn't disclose that you had strep throat 7 years ago on the form, so we can't pay your $10000 one night hospital stay...". Affordable Care Act should have fixed that apparently, but who knows.

It's good to know Google is playing by the same rules.

>Affordable Care Act should have fixed that apparently, but who knows.

When you buy a Marketplace ACA plan, you are not required to provide a detailed health history.

Whether or not its a marketplace plan, preexisting conditions exclusions or additional charges, and consequently retroactive cancellation based on such exclusions, are prohibited by the ACA.

> Affordable Care Act should have fixed that apparently, but who knows.

Just to clarify what I'm sure rdtsc meant, since that statement can be read two ways.

The ACA codified into law that they cannot do that over a decade ago. He is almost certainly just questioning if they are breaking that law.

Among other things, the ACA no longer lets them charge you different rates if you had strep throat 7 years ago, so the only questions through the marketplace are your county (or zip code?) of residence, your sex, your smoking history and your age.

> He is almost certainly just questioning if they are breaking that law.

That's for clarifying. Yeah, I just meant that I had a vague understanding that this kind of stuff should not be happening any longer based on ACA. But I stopped following years ago. Knowing those companies, guessing they probably found other ways to screw people over.

Much like online casinos that lets you quickly register and deposit, but will ask for ID verification when cashing out.

KYC is required for various terrorism prevention and (moreso) tax reporting reasons, and that's for everywhere, not just Google in the US. What specifically caused it to fail? Using a different name than what was on your identity verification documents? Not being a registered corporation with valid tax withholding information?

You could however be honest and do KYC before onboarding a customer - instead they're happy to let them run ads and end up keeping the money under the excuse of a KYC failure (which they don't have much incentive to rectify).

I suppose they’re afraid of the process putting a damper on signups. The middle of the road option would be to have an easy signup and then you can complete KYC at any point before your first payment.

Apparently though, they're not afraid of the process preventing people from accessing their money.

The middle road option if they want to delay KYC checks would be to have customer support available to unstuck people when the system fails.

The middle road is allow signup, but require KYC within a few weeks to continue using.

I think KYC can't ever be honest because at its very foundational core it is the idea that you've let yourself willingly be deputized by the government to spy on those customers without a valid search warrant.

To spy on them and report them for non-crimes, and to deny them services because the specific numbers are above arbitrary thresholds, at arbitrary thresholds, and yes... even below those.

If you're already empowered by the feds to do all these things, what's a little dishonesty on top of all that? As long as you don't fuck over the feds themselves, they'll surely look the other way when bilk free advertising dollars out of those probably-terrorists.

There was no reason given, no appeal process, can't contact anyone at Google to try to sort it out. Just failed. I understand why it's necessary, but they also have zero incentive for it to be good or even functional.

> can't contact anyone at Google to try to sort it out

This is a huge problem with most tech companies. There is little to no human support which ends up with a complete loss of access to accounts and, sometimes, funds. Because the accounts are usually free or funds lost are way too tiny to warrant a suit, there is little to no accountability.

Yep. This is one of the huge reasons why I avoid doing business with/depending on/being exposed to tech companies, especially of the FAANG variety. It is demonstrably too risky.

Ok but if you're supposed to arbitrate disputes then you must be able to contact someone to start that arbitration process, if there's no one to contact then I guess you could go to small claims and get the money.

Ah. Here's the genius part though, and the real business innovation of tech:

>Make a software platform everyone just agrees to click through EULA's for >Someone realizes, wait, this is a contract. I'm supposed to be able to negotiate. >Nigh impossible to get in contact with legal. >If you do, they just ignore you. >Get more people to do it. >Business goes under rather than actually try to exist in a world where everyone doesn't just mindlessly accept terms. Or >To many small claims court cases, National Court system encourages private arbitration >Still too expensive.

To be quite frank, and though I'm loathe to make encourage people to send business at lawyers... We live in a world that is entirely the result of our refusal to challenge terms. So many abusive businesses would disappear overnight if suddenly their legal bills went through the roof.

There's no good faith in the vast majority of contracts anymore because all of it is take it or leave it levels of abusive.

The parent wasn't objecting to KYC. They were objecting to "once you fail automated ID verification once, you're banned from attempting it again, and Google keeps the several thousand dollars they owe you."

This pattern of facts doesn't look like a terrorism prevention system, it looks like theft, you would have a good case in any court with this pattern of facts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming

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