Opinions are my own.
Tbh, any ads with the phrase "get out of debt" sounds very shady to me. I wouldn't give it the benefits of doubt personally.
> Microsoft never answered at all. After two weeks of silence I reached out to them myself, and the agent tried to be nice, but the phrase “I understand your feelings, but, I’m afraid you’re banned for life and this cannot be changed” just broke me.
If two companies with 100% different spam & abuse systems detected something wrong with this ads, I have the feeling we're not hearing the full story here. Microsoft even went to the extreme of "ban-for-life".
Do we know this for sure, or are we assuming they only use in-house resources to determine "suspiciousness"? Could they both be contracting out to the same third-party for some additional trustworthiness signal?
Yes, that is true and was the big red flag for me. I believe it would be in their best interest to exchange the data on potential fraudsters, because it would make their life simpler.
But for what it's worth I went to Google's financial services advertising page and quickly identified at least a few items that might be the cause of an issue. It seems likely that some of these items, like providing a physical address, would also be required by Microsoft. It's also worth noting that the service seems to be offered from Russia and I know that many countries are currently sanctioning parts of the Russian economy to some degree or another, which seems possibly relevant.
> Google's financial services advertising page
Can you give me the link?
> It's also worth noting that the service seems to be offered from Russia
That is true. But Google is available in Russia and allows businesses to buy ads without any limits. I know a Russian service called raindrop.io (bookmark sync app) that buys ads in Google and runs a worldwide service, and they get no bans.
Also if you intend to advertise in countries with stricter requirements e.g. the UK or the EU there are additional obligations you need to meet such as business verification:
> For the purposes of this policy, we consider financial products and services to be those related to the management or investment of money and cryptocurrencies, including personalised advice
We don't do anything of this kind. We're basically an excel spreadsheet with your expenses, no "money" actually involved here.
You literally have a service for money management that also according to you provides an “advice”.
*Planning and budgeting
This would be considered financial advice under UK law for example.
You are running a weird looking service from Russia, stating that it falls under Russian law, no contact details no business registration info.
The name is dodgy as hell, and overall it looks to be more like sage books for a small scale illicit operation than a budget planning app for Grandma.
There are plenty legitimate budget apps out most of them rely on open banking standard rather than CSV/OFX import or manual entry.
Pretty much nothing here seems to be useful to the average user, however if I ever decide to start selling dirty bombs (hi NSA…) on the black market and I need to run my books somewhere I might give it a go.
I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt here.