[afandian]

> Can't the allegedly smartest company on Earth figure out some solution to help people in these extreme cases?

I was in a different but comparable situation with Google. I closed my paid account, they claimed I owe them money, and the only way of replying is to log in with said non-existent account.

It's a trivially foreseeable situation, and trivially detected. I bet it's quite common too. If a reasonably intelligent person sat down for five minutes to think about the cancellation process they would identify this branch.

Either those expensive product and software people are incompetent, or they genuinely, deliberately, don't care about edge cases. I can only conclude that it's the second option.

The popular hypothesis is that they couldn't operate at scale without keeping customers away from humans at all costs. But I'm not sure it's true.

[maxbond]

I bet there's lots of people who do care, I think it's usually the structure of an organization that stops problems from getting solved and not the moral failing of any individual. It's entirely possible that literally everyone involved wants to get it fixed, there's a ticket with 100 comments below it detailing how the fix will be implemented, but everytime it makes it into the sprint it gets kicked out and quarter or two because something mission critical always comes up.

[afandian]

Yes, that's very plausible that things could play out that way. But when the stakes are this high, and in an organization as highly staffed as Google, that's pure negligence. Someone designed these emails I'm getting, and designed the workflow.

[himinlomax]

> I closed my paid account, they claimed I owe them money, and the only way of replying is to log in with said non-existent account.

What about sending them a physical, certified letter? Have your lawyer write it.

[afandian]

Their only legal address is in the US. I'm in the UK, and stopped short of looking for a solicitor who would be able to handle this. I'm still considering filing a complaint with the UK Telecoms regulator 'Ofcom'.

The punchline is that the American collections agency they use actually do respond to email and (I believe) dealt with it. But for it to go as far as a collections agency was nuts.

[himinlomax]

Don't they have a legal address in the UK, like for tax purposes?

> I'm still considering filing a complaint with the UK Telecoms regulator 'Ofcom'.

You should!

[afandian]

Nope. I was doing business with Google Ireland. For a while we were all in the EU though...

But the threatening emails came from Mountain View.

This page is all you get: https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/6151275

[himinlomax]

That shouldn't stop you from contacting Google Ireland. They are part of the same company and are their local legal presence after all. If you send them a certified letter and they sign for it, that's it.

[jen20]

Not caring about such basic edge cases makes them incompetent, of course.