[GordonS]

This is a bad take - the person who violated ToS hadn't worked at the OP's company for 3 years!

In addition, it hardly seems relevant that a ToS violation from an employee's personal account should result in effectively destroying a business.

Something really has to change with how Google handles this kind of thing. At the very least they need to have a working appeals process handled by people.

[anaccountexists]

That’s exactly my point though. If they hadn’t worked there in 3 years, why were they still associated with the developer account in the first place?

There’s a couple of ways (that are best practices for any company) to avoid this problem: - Have separate Google accounts for work / personal use - Remove old employees from the developer account when terminated

[mijoharas]

I think that's actually the issue. There was no current association with the companies account anymore.

Having separate google accounts for work and personal use does not actually solve this, since google has an algorithm to figure out if the accounts are used by the same person.[0][1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30855682

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30855659

[nightpool]

OP never said that "there was no current association with the companies account". In fact, they say explicitly that there was an association, because H still had permissions on an (unpublished) game that was part of their Play Store account.