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Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

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Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#181
post #36

TIL never to buy physical products directly from Google! Or for that matter to never use Google Pay, even if the c/c charge isn't run by them. You could go from "credit card buyer protection" to Google Doomsday with a single disputed charge. I wonder how they handle "bank reversals", where a report of a stolen card (but not specifically a customer-generated chargeback) results in a reversal of the charge by the bank…

Very good point about Google Pay. I never thought of that but you're right. If some vendor's misbehaviour ends up cascading in my losing access tp my Google account this would be catastrophic. Thanks a lot. Removing it now.

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#182

The only monetary relationship I have with Google is a paid youtube sub. I actively avoid getting involved in any business relationship with Google because of the mountain of evidence that it’s a bad idea. No Google suite. No Google cloud. No hardware. Google is an advertising company. They make their money from advertising and the rest of the revenue is a pittance to them, so they have no incentive to provide any su…

I'm in the same boat as you, only youtube left, I moved all services away from google and I'm working actively to move us away from Google Cloud, funny, I think I started using google around 2001 and now I want to stop using it because of all these incidents. Also their OSS sucks, they won't take any PRs from externals.

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ordered a Chromecast on the Google store a couple years back and the item never came. Google wouldn’t refund or reship and I was so close to doing a chargeback, but 20 wasn’t worth the trouble. I’m so glad I didn’t. Now I know to buy Google products from elsewhere and slowly migrate away from Gmail.

This feels like a huge gap in consumer protections. Retaliatory account bans seem like they should not be legal when a retailer fails to deliver. Of course this is all exacerbated by how large the entities in question are and how the same account may govern access to multiple services.

Agreed.

Steam froze my account to punish a PayPal dispute, the amount they would not refund was ~£2. Their refusal was contrary to UK law.

Small story about Steam. They sold me a broken game, in UK one can return broken things according to the Consumer Rights Act, specifically including digital goods. Steam said, at length, they would not refund me: the game would crash (losing some settings) after ~30 minutes, I spent more than 2h of playtime trying to fix it [it's a 50h+ game, I'd have accepted an 8p reduction in my refund!].

I complained to PayPal. PayPal decided in my favour -- ie in keeping with UK law. Steam didn't dispute PayPal's findings but instead froze my Steam account (and I assume paid PayPal the money back). PayPal made me whole, financially.

My Steam account was blocked for a month or so. Ongoing they "punish" me by making it hard for me to give them money -- which is good for me, but my kids are not keen!

WhyTF would I complain over a few £. It's the principle, clearly.

It was very interesting to me to see how a big company can ignore the law in this way. But also spend what must amount to quite a bit of customer service time just to avoid a minimal refund.

All I wanted was a refund for a game Steam sold, that was broken and wouldn't be fixed. I did cursory searching for bugs before buying, but hadn't found this particular one before my purchase.

You know what I did with the refund money, bought the next game in the same series, because it was only the bug that I didn't like, and I paid more money for it than the game they wouldn't refund ... mad, eh!

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#184

Honestly, the top comment is more concerning: https://old.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/zndbku/tifu_by_accide... Account stolen. Obvious fraudulent charges. EA refuses to make it right. Customer rightfully disputes the charges. EA closes their account locking them out of an entire catalogue of content THEY HAD PAID for. This whole “you don’t really own digital content” ruse needs to be popped. A company shouldn’t be abl…

I am not a lawyer, but this is one of those things that sounds like a case for FTC. If it happened to me, I would be officially sending complaints to every single regulatory agency Google could fall under. The post does not state where customer was based, but depending on state state attorney general may get interested. It actually sounds like something that:

a) public will understand and support b) help with re-election prospects

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#186
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And often Microsoft would not put the charge through, at least if you were working to try to solve the problem without them. I don't know what their criteria were, but I don't think I ever paid despite calling a few times.

The terms I remember (note that there are so many different Microsoft licensing agreements, so yours could’ve been totally different) were that you weren’t charged if the problem you called for was indeed a problem with Microsoft software. And that definition was quite liberal: not just obvious software bugs, but also confusing documentation, etc. In other words, as long as you RTFM before you called, it was free.

That’s still the case today, even though the base charge is now $500/incident. I always get a refund.

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a use case that public blockchains could solve for us. Having a decentralized proof of digital rights ownership on a public blockchain could separate the content provider (Amazon / Google / EA) from the actual media they provide by storing it on IPFS or some other decentralized file store. There would need to be a lot of work done to make this happen and big companies would have to get on board. It doesn't se…

So time to play the same old game: does block chain provide any value here that a separate centralized DB doesn't? Let's see, can't you solve the exact same problem by simply having a centralized organization have a database of digital content ownership? Essentially a title record DB? Seems like it. And how does your blockchain solution solve the problem of someone is hacking the game and needs to be banned? Can the…

Disclaimer: this is not my domain.

But wouldn’t the blockchain give a decentralised record of ownership that was protected from corruption? If a single entity owns this database, how does it fare against attacks/bad actors, or highly capitalists companies like EA going in and editing it in their best interests.

You need a truly good organisation to host that single DB and I’m not sure I tryst any of them at the moment.

(Also thought I have a cursory knowledge of blockchain technology, so please correct me if I’m off.)

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#190

To me, the issue with Google's products and services is that they're not willing to provide any human customer service to resolve the real issues. Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet. If they had a normal phone number available where anybody could reach a human at any time, every confused person would call them with i…

See... for me that is actually an argument that they are way too big, because they are not able to properly service their existing customer base.
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