Admob refunded all my payments | Hacker News Reader

Admob refunded all my payments

forums.makingmoneywithandroid.com

123 pointsCaligula39 comments

I noticed a bunch of debits and credits to my credit card yesterday relating to admob. I never initiated these so I feared that my credit card was stolen.

I searched around and saw this link that described my issue. Apparently google has authorization to credit and debit our credit cards at will. They also do not bother to email you to let you know what is going on. And of course, no google customer service.

It also turns out that my debits and credits are not identical as the exchange rates vary and perhaps credit card fees occured. So I am either a bit up or down. Merry fucking christmas google.

If they didn't process the take backs as reversals, you can dispute the transactions.

I tried this on my amex to see what would happen. Normally you can submit a dispute online. This time I just got a message saying to call customer service.

If this ends up costing you even $1, I would dispute it based on principle. And would not be surprised if a class action lawyer gets interested in extracting some compensation from Google.

But note that if they do then it'll be the lawyers who actually get all the compensation they extract.

This is exactly what I have wrong with the parent to this post. "Dispute for the principle of it," so that some lawyer(s) can make big money off a mistake Google made. How is that helpful to anyone (except the lawyers)? It ends up making everyone more reserved, or even killing a company off (probably not in the case of Google).

Well the lawyer and the principal plaintiff.

> I would dispute it based on principle.

What principle exactly? You had an accident that (minimally) affected me, so I'm going to charge you for it? I could understand if it was something major, but for the hypothetical dollar, really?

The principle that someone else's mistakes shouldn't cost you money.

I reiterate, if it was a major amount of money, I can see that. Pursuing actions against someone who made a mistake just seems unnecessary. They've already publicly admitted they screwed something up. Someone on their end probably got into major trouble, if not fired, for said mistake.

The instinct to say, "you screwed up and now you're going to pay" baffles me every time. Why does everyone feel entitled to seek compensation for inconvenience? When did that become ok?

I see this on here constantly, and whenever it's pointed out, it's immediately down voted. And yeah, I'm expecting this to get down voted, again.

Because people have this thing called a backbone. If you're fine with someone going into your account and pulling money at will, all the power to you, but most people will not tolerate that shit. You are a customer and they are a business, no feelings, no emotional bullshit, simple straight up facts.

I disagree pretty fundamentally with your first line. "Having a backbone" is in no way equivalent to being reasonable when someone (or an organization) makes a mistake.

> If you're fine with someone going into your account and pulling money at will, all the power to you

If you've got a Google AdMob, you've already done this, right? You've given them the ability to push/pull from your account, and signed whatever agreement about "we're not responsible for xyz."

I don't have an account, but presumably there was some line in there about not being liable for mischarges, or something along those lines.

Does anybody have a good explanation of how credit card charge limits actually work? I once had Jet Airways mistakenly charge me $30,000 (in two installments of $15,000) on a card that had a limit of $14,000, and while I was unable to use the card afterwards, the original charge should not have been possible in the first place. When I called the bank to complain, all they could say is that it was an "offline" transaction and thus apparently unlimited.

(And yes, I got it reversed eventually, and then had to pick another fight to get them to credit me the difference in exchange rates in the meantime. All this because Jet's shiny new booking engine apparently didn't multithread too well and replaced my $300 tickets with somebody else's... longer version of story here: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/other-asian-australian-south-...)

The entire system is designed so banks implicitly trust each other. As with anything else, as a business grows you eventually start cutting out middlemen to reduce costs. Eventually large players are treated effectively as banks themselves, and can push any transaction they want into the network. As long as things total out correctly at the end of the day between individual banks, nobody really gets in trouble.

It ends up being a lot more complicated than that (as everything in banking is), but that is the general idea.

and then... Enron.

I remember calling my bank one day and hearing that not only was my balance over a billion dollars, but I had a "two day float" of several million dollars. I called back to make sure I had the right number. I did--the amounts were increasing. Unfortunately, by the end of the day whatever it was corrected itself, and I was no longer a Forbes billionaire.

Withdraw cash and flee to a non-extradition-treaty country in your newly-purchased cargo plane?

What is the maximum amount of cash you could withdraw from a bank account in a single day with no advance notice to the bank?

Probably less than $10,000. And probably not enough to be worth fleeing to a safe haven for since the plane tickets and one week in a hotel will cost approximately that.

I've personally done more than that. You do run into reporting issues if you pull more than $10k at once though.

Same issue happened to me, Google responded several hours later with the following email:

""" Dear AdMob Developer,

Last week, we wrote to let you know that on December 19th 2013 we would initiate refunds to you for unused legacy AdMob advertising credits. Today we are writing to let know that between December 19th and 20th we inadvertently processed refunds for more than your unused balance. In some cases, customers will see multiple refund amounts on their bank card statement.

To correct this error, we have reversed these incorrect refunds with corresponding transactions for the same amount(s). These corrections have been processed on December 23rd and December 24th to the same bank card that the initial refund(s) was processed to. This means that you will see one negative and one positive transaction on your card statement for each refund made in error. These transactions will have “GOOGLE*ADMOB” as the description for the credits.

We will be processing the correct refund in early January 2014 for the correct amount owed to you. You will see a separate transaction for this refund amount on your January or February bank card statement.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

If you have any questions about this communication please check out our FAQ’s linked here.

Sincerely, The Google AdMob Team """

I'm unaffected by this as I have never used Admob but I wonder which imbecile at Google thought it was a good idea to mess with payments and push/pull money out of people's bank/Paypal accounts around Christmas holidays?

I feel bad for all those affected knowing that there's virtually no way to get any kind of customer service from Google.

It may have something to do with the transition from "old" to "new" Admob. Advertisers can request refunds for unused funds from the "old" Admob, maybe that job had a bug and refunded everything. Makes you wonder how that's possible for a company that has the supposedly brightest of the best developers.

I wonder if there is much of a difference in engineering talent between the advertising products (AdSense, AdWords, Admob, etc) side of Google compared to the consumer and business product divisions (search, maps, G+, docs, etc) and data center engineering.

The talent is the same caliber across the board with the only exception possibly being new acquisitions.

If anything I would expect the ad related engineers to be more talented, given that it ads are the bread and butter of Google's business.

The smartest people can still make mistakes.

Few days ago Google emailed me saying they have credited all my advertiser balance on admob. But yesterday I noticed a debit of $50 on my credit card from them. I never ever used Admob for advertising but only as a publisher on some of my apps long ago. I can't wait to speak someone to resolve this after holidays. Something is surely messed up with admob.

The biggest issue I have with this is Google's practically non-existent customer service.

Given this is the single biggest running complaint I've seen about Google for the past decade, it's impressive how resistant to doing anything about it they are. Specifically regarding their advertising customers / partners. The sad reality of course is, they don't have to care, as there's no competitive threat to their core such that they might be forced to offer real customer service.

Google screwed me over good today. Around Dec 20 admob refunded me $4400 in multiple transactions. then few days later they took $2700. This gave me $1700 refund which looked ok, since I deposited around 200-300K into admob over time. Today I woke up and found a -14K in my BOA account after admob decided to batch rape my account with 120 transactions for around 17K. My Bank of America that gives me a fraud alert every time I make an extra purchase just let them have this, no problem oh Google Gods. I called my bank today and did a claim, they didn't give me temporary credit pending investigation like the usually do because of the amount and the number of transactions, blah blah, and it can take up to 90 days to get my money back. I spend the whole day today trying to figure out how to run my business with no money. I can go on and on about how much $h1t, grief, nerves and money this has caused me, but I don't have time to whine. I'm not the type to sue people, but they are going to pay for this. not even out of principal, the $h1t just got REAL.

Happened with me too,few days back I got a notification about some payment into my account by Google Admob and an email about refund, I thought it must be some unused fund but yesterday I got another notification about google taking it back! I was puzzled that is it my bank account or google's, they seem to be doing whatever they want with it.

My account was disabled one year ago. No warning, no reason. Then I contacted the customer service of Admob, after few days, they told me their system detected that my account has some issues. I lost hundreds dollar just because the arithmetic said I was criminal. And someothers told me, their system made mistakes sometimes. If you met, it's your own badluck. :(

Sounds like an awesome way to get some sky miles

Wow, no kidding.

Hmm... do you lose miles for refunds that are not linked with the original transaction?

I assume so, someone would have gamed that a long time ago otherwise.

People are gaming the system. They are just smart enough not to brag about it.

I'm actually curious about this. You can refund without having an original charge. This is exactly how Square's new payment system is working. This is simply because a refund is not canceling the original withdrawal, rather it's depositing the original transaction amount back. I'm not quite sure how a credit card company could determine the exact transaction link (other than just comparing merchant and transaction amounts). Maybe they just deduct the base points rate on the deposited amount. I then wonder how they would handle if I bought a TV during a promotion for a bonus 3% points and then returned it.

However, I wonder what would happen if I were to send money from my actual credit card to my Google Wallet (with no fees until Jan 6th, unless extended), and then use the Google Wallet card to use Square to send the money back to my bank account using my debit card. If I wanted to slow the process I could use a bank transfer from Google wallet. Of course there are daily/weekly limits for both of these but it's a method I think would work.

If it works, it's somewhere in here: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/manufactured-spending-719/

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