[theshrike79]

Never mess with Ad Words, that makes the Alphabet Beast angry every time.

I've heard the exact same Ad Words story a few times now, someone used their CC or had at one point in the distant past used with Ad Words and the system flagged it. Everything gone with no warning, no explanation and no way to complain. Even getting to the front page of HN didn't work =)

[paulgb]

We were lucky enough that getting to the front page of HN did work for us[1], but it's worth noting that it doesn't even have to be your card! Simply having a card from an issuer (in our case a legit, YC-backed, US-based startup bank) that got flagged was enough to have our account suspended and appeals denied.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32237445

[mcv]

Sounds like credit cards are the wrong payment system for GCP. Do they support direct bank transactions? They definitely should, if they don't trust credit cards (which I can understand).

[rurp]

Not to be glib but it sounds like GCP is the wrong cloud system to use in production. Credit card numbers get stolen and show up in weird places all the time, and the way Google handles these cases shows you what Google thinks of its customers. Why build on such an untrustworthy platform when there are alternatives?

[wizofaus]

If other cloud platforms can trust and accept them why on earth can't GCP?

[mcv]

Probably because they're easily stolen and popular for fraud.

I'm never going to blame someone for not trusting credit cards. Only if you don't trust them, you should offer a better alternative.

[thwaway053]

The issue is not trusting credit cars, but how you handle suspected fraud.

Google should know that credit cards can get leaked/stolen. Suspending an account without notification is not the right solution. At least give the customer a chance to defend itself, change payment methods or switch to a different platform.

[mcv]

Totally agree. If they don't trust credit cards, they shouldn't keep customers in the dark and then cancel them out of nowhere, they should offer a better alternative. Treating paying customers like that is terrible in every possible way. The mistake is entirely Google's.

[fortran77]

But the person you're replying to didn't use ad words! Someone stole his CC number and used adwords.

[theshrike79]

Alphabet doesn't care, as far as they are concerned, someone messed with their Holy Money Machine and doesn't deserve to exist.

[omniglottal]

Again, the "doesn't deserve to exist" refers clearly to a different entity than the paying customer who was punished for zero action of their own.

[theshrike79]

And again, Alphabet doesn't care =)

"This credit card messed with our money machine, it and everyone connected to it are now permanently blacklisted everywhere on our ecosystem."

They genuinely do not care who did what and whose number it was and who got hurt and whether it was used with or without permission. That CC tried to exploit the mighty money machine and that's it.

[samstave]

Someone needs to pipe ad-words into DALLE and see what the ad-words-as-prompts-as-an-AI-service pumps out. Im out of credits at the moment, else I'd do it.

[samstave]

OK - I am a fully paid person on DALLE and MIDJOURNEY. Someone give me some google adwords prompts to pipe to these "things" (scary fn things - artists are dead)