Forum Overview :: Lively: Google Creates Something Terrible
 
I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi by blackwater 05/22/2019, 8:43am PDT
A former Google Fi booster changes his mind when Google puts him through customer service hell.

I know, I know, we all know Google is terrible. It's old news. But the exact details of how terrible they are are kind of hilarious.

The author apparently ran into the "Google death penalty" due to a billing dispute.


[My husband] made a purchase through the Google Store (for a Pixel 3 during the travel promotion, but it could just as easily have been an in-app purchase, or premium content on YouTube, or literally anything where Google collects the money). There were some issues with the payment (Chase declined the initial transaction as suspicious due to some other fraud I’d had on the card that same day, but Google still shipped the phone instead of flagging the payment, and obviously that’s not how the exchange of money for goods is supposed to work), and the process of getting that figured out triggered a “security check” with Google Payments.

It’s important to note, however, that the exact circumstances don’t really matter.

From what I’ve since learned, if a card in your Google Pay is stolen, or someone uses your Payments account fraudulently, or anything happens that leads to a security flag being raised, it can lead to your Google Payments account being frozen.

And that can wreak havoc on your Google life.

If you can’t use Google Payments, you can’t pay for Google Fi
This, fundamentally, is why I can’t suggest anyone use Project Fi anymore.

My husband has always paid his Google Fi bill with his Ink Plus, and has nearly three years of on-time (automatic) payments. This is the only card linked to his account, and there’s no indication that the Fi and Payments accounts “talk”. So while we were fixing the issue with the Google Store (which was on a completely different card), we didn’t give any thought to how it might impact other services.

Until Fi suspended his service for non-payment.

And his Android/Google Pay stopped working.

And his ability to make YouTube purchases ended.

And all in-app purchases started failing.

And he could no longer use Hangouts to make calls.

You get the picture.


Google is like the government in Terry Gilliam's Brazil where you can be unpersoned for being a dissident, but also if your name is "Buttle" and the computer thinks it looks similar to Tuttle.

There's also a long and terrible Hacker News thread where it's hard to find even a single apologist for Google. In fact, people just share more stories like this. And there are tons of threads suggesting a credit card chargeback where someone replies that they're too terrified of Google to even consider it. Great job, guys.
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I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi by blackwater 05/22/2019, 8:43am PDT NEW
 
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