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I did a chargeback against Google as they wouldn’t refund fraudulent Adsense charges. My account didn’t get banned.
A chargeback can be initiated for any number of reasons.. It's good business practice to disable the account of someone claiming fraud, to prevent more fraud.. :D
Many people (including me) raised this issue internally at Google more than a decade ago now during the Google+ era. Vic Gundotra decided that not using your "real name" was a bannable offense despite the many legitimate concerns people brought up [1]. This was of course an automatic process and there were (completely predictably) false positives. This would kill your entire Google account, Gmail included. I was one…
1. Search around for back channel support. Google things like “executive customer support”. Often times these emails get published by bloggers, forums, etc.
You can also look up support VP /Director’s names and then guess their email (e.g. first.last@example.com) and tell them your story.
2. Send a signature-required letter detailing out the issue, steps taken, and your requested resolution
These two steps get you significantly closer to having a person who can actually solve your problem actually look into the issue.
This is completely normal for companies to do this and there is a 99% chance that doing a chargeback will get your account immediately terminated.
You cannot have it both ways with chargebacks and keeping your account as I have said before [0] as it is rife with abuse and friendly fraud and the merchant reserves the right to suspend, terminate and ban your account if you do so as per their ToS.
So this is of course hardly a surprise here.
Many people (including me) raised this issue internally at Google more than a decade ago now during the Google+ era. Vic Gundotra decided that not using your "real name" was a bannable offense despite the many legitimate concerns people brought up [1]. This was of course an automatic process and there were (completely predictably) false positives. This would kill your entire Google account, Gmail included. I was one…
Sure, there will be some rough edges (what when I am banned from GDrive but not Gmail, but then I click the 'save to drive' button in gmail?). Who will test that codepath?
How about when i DDoS the antivirus service API? - does that mean my email will no longer be scanned?
But a few rough edges for a few users seems better than a few users very unhappy and enough to become negative PR sources for life.
Dealing with support was near impossible, no one had power to override the order, until finally I said I'd chargeback, then they were suddenly able to cancel it...
Obviously I'd never actually charge back though, as shown here, I assumed I'd get the boot