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Spanish Boy Racks Up €100K Bill, Google Cancels The Charge

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Re: Spanish Boy Racks Up €100K Bill, Google Cancels The Charge

#31

Post by maaaats »

webtechgal wrote: post #21

Something definitely smells out of place here. I believe the AdWords policies vary from country to country (and from time to time) but the last I checked (2015), here in India, you had to have at least one verifiable payment method (card/bank account) in order to even activate an AdWords account, leave alone the matter of running up a balance of Euro 100,000. So how did a 12 y-o manage to do that?

Where I live, you can get a bank card (not credit) as a teenager. But you are unable to put yourself in debt. So you can use the card to buy stuff, but companies should be wary of using the card details to verify future purchases.

In this case, if you pay for AdWords credit up front and then spend them, the company is fine. But if they charge a bill after the fact, the contract allowing those charges wouldn't be legal, and that's the responsibility of the professional part.

Re: Spanish Boy Racks Up €100K Bill, Google Cancels The Charge

#32

Post by chatwinra »

ikeboy wrote: post #4

1. Get kids to open AdWords accounts for you 2. Spend 100k on each on affiliate marketing. Even a non optimized campaign on a good offer is still going to bring in 5 figures 3. ?????? 4. Profit

5. Donate profit to charity.

The circle of life is complete.

Re: Spanish Boy Racks Up €100K Bill, Google Cancels The Charge

#35

Post by jorgemf »

A spanish source: http://www.elcomercio.com/tendencias/deuda-google-nino-publi...

12 years old kid is punished to stay at home, he decides to be a famous youtuber and somehow he ends up giving his bank account. Fist invoices are low, after one month with a 19k invoice the bank notifies the parents and the parents block all the invoices.

Re: Spanish Boy Racks Up €100K Bill, Google Cancels The Charge

#36

Post by akcreek »

I spend about $20k/mo with Adwords and, at least in the US, Google charges every $500. I'll often have multiple charges from them on my card per day during the week. I find it very annoying to have all of these small charges to review on our expense report and asked that they increase the threshold and they refused.

I've never not paid a bill (it's automatic), but I find it extremely hard to believe that once the payment failed at 500 Euro they would allow the account to accrue 99,500 Euro more in charges. That is assuming they have a similar threshold to charge where this user was.

Re: Spanish Boy Racks Up €100K Bill, Google Cancels The Charge

#37

Post by mattparlane »

To me, the problem is that all this kid really did is hike up the bid price of competitive keywords, therefore earning more money for Google. I have the same issue with them giving away money for trials, or giving thousands to non-profits.

It's gaming their own system from within -- if someone is given money to splurge on Adwords, they will pour it into really competitive keywords without really caring about the return, jacking up the price for those who are paying real money.

It might sound altruistic, but there is a pretty real benefit for Google.

Re: Spanish Boy Racks Up €100K Bill, Google Cancels The Charge

#38

Post by nommm-nommm »

alvarosm wrote: post #30
troels wrote: post #8

So, someone in Google's accounting department handled a mistake in a mature and responsible way. Good on them.

They should have charged the idiot parents who gave him access to their bank account. But they did not only in order to save face and not be portrayed as an evil corporation by the media. There are no mistakes here. The idiot kid wanted publicity at any cost, the idiot parents want to give the kid everything he wants and Google doesn't want any more hostile propaganda in Europe.

The boy had his own bank account. It was a joint account with his parents so his parents were notified of the charges.

Re: Spanish Boy Racks Up €100K Bill, Google Cancels The Charge

#39

Post by Cyph0n »

wslh wrote: post #26
the_duke wrote: post #5

In Austria, you are not contractually capable until you are 14, and from 14-18 you are so only in a limited fashion, as allowed by the assets available to you. Probably Spain has similar laws (age of majority is 18 in Spain), making the whole AdWords contract invalid. So there would not have been any way for Google to get the money. So this most likely wasn't anything 'charitable' done by Google, just the law. Nothin…

You just gave me a good idea to save a lot of money in ads: Mechanical Turk for kids... just kidding!

Yeah back to the 19th century we go. People love old school stuff, so VCs will probably fund the shit out of it :p

Re: Spanish Boy Racks Up €100K Bill, Google Cancels The Charge

#40

Post by ParanoidShroom »

dorfsmay wrote: post #24
reustle wrote: post #2

So, you can get away with blowing >$100k on adwords and nobody bats an eye (he was auto-billed), but on AWS I can't spin up more than a few elastic IPs or EBS volumes without going through verification hoops :)

Agreed, if anything, this story is interesting because it shows that Google will let brand new customers go from 0 to 100 k$ without any checking! I really thought I had to add a credit card before I could use adwords,and that they charge at the end of the first month. I feel like there's something missing from this story.

No the story, is bullshit. You will get charged the first 250$, after that it will be increased to 500$. And only upped once the payment is complete. This continues for a few more steps. So you can't spend 100K on a new account. This entire story just sounds like pure BS. Google has a LOT of stuff against fraud, especially on it ads business. As it's the core ...
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