[jholman]

I, of course, know nothing about your case. And if I did, I wouldn't be able to discuss it in public, because it'd get me fired. It must be nice taking shots in public where you know no-one can shoot back.

But since I'm completely ignorant of your case, I'm gonna shoot my mouth off a bit, and hope I don't get in trouble for it.

Google spends insane amounts of effort tracking these cases. I've met lots of six-figure-salary folks who hours or days of every week looking into corner cases. And they're just the tip of the iceberg. Again, I'm not speaking to your particular case, but the thing we learn is that out of every hundred people who say what you're saying, at least 99 of them have repeatedly violated the rules, and more than 50 of them got multiple warnings.

And it's not like Google is keeping the money. Google's fraud-fighting effort is not a profit centre, by any stretch.

I'm not saying that Customer Service is Google's forte, but the internet is full of a lot of lies, and lots of them are told by people who tried to scam us, or scam our customers, and are hilariously outraged that we caught them.

[hellotoruser]

I am posting this from Tor, since we are still dependent on Google in many ways. We had a similar situation, where a growing startup that many people here may know about (getting 15000+ signups per day at the time, now more) was getting threats from AdSense that some of our pages violated some vague and amorphous content policies that are actually written to be violated (and 99% of AdSense publishers that do not 100% control their content violate them- think of Myspace.com for example- but they were too big to violate AdSense policies). Our account bringing over $10,000/mo was shut down.

We have documented everything and we are now in a much stronger position, thanks to our users. We have access to Techcrunch/Techdirt, and we have considered publishing a comprehensive documented story of our experience with AdSense, but decided to put it on hold, since we do not want to associate our name with any controversy. When our start-up successfully exits or if it fails, the situation may change.

I just want to add a couple of things to jholman:

You start from the presumption of guilt. An old adage is that your customer is always right, but your starting point is the opposite. This is probably driven by hubris, that's embedded in Google's DNA: you KNOW BEFORE your customer that your customer wants to commit fraud, BEFORE they have actually committed it.

My point is simple: when you threaten to turn off a $5,000+/mo client, provide knowledgeable PHONE SUPPORT. Have your specialist CALL the victim business. These amounts are not a small change to many people, they will lead to bad PR, like was linked in this thread earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803568.

And do not worry, you will not get fired for defending Google!

[mentat]

You could have left the first two paragraphs off and the tone of the post would have been much improved. It sounds like you've got a chip on your shoulder which impacts the positive impact your (unofficial) representation could have.