Next time just charge them back with your credit card

This tends to be a terrible idea, unless you really just want to nuke your Google account.

(Googler, opinions are my own. I work on payments.)

Not a googler, but: this is absolutely right.

Chargebacks are the mutually assured destruction of banking. There’s nothing wrong with firing a nuclear weapon if you truly feel it’s in your best interests; if you do, expect that your adversary will respond in kind and terminate all business with you now and in the future.

Sometimes that’s the right move, sometimes it’s not, just go into it with eyes open.

If you have a billing agreement in place with a company, doing a chargeback is just nullifying a payment. The balance can still be sent to collections.

Very possibly. If that happens, on the one hand, you’ll definitely escape algorithmic support - you’ll be in a world where people have to listen. On the other, they’ll only respond to certified mail.

I doubt Google would send anyone to collections in these circumstances. But - Careful what you wish for!

LOL @ people in collections "have to listen"

Over the past serval months I realized with certainty that I should never use my personal Gmail account for any other Google services.

Gmail is Gmail only, for everything else create separate Google accounts you are not afraid to lose.

That's not good enough, they relate multiple accounts too, sometimes incorrectly.

IIRC a company got their project booted from the play store, because one of the developers accounts got a black mark.

I don’t think Google will resort to matching my accounts by IP address or some fingerprinting technique.

In any case, I am in the process of migrating off Gmail too, it just takes a lot of effort. But to your point, I should probably also download all my gmail data and archive it just in case.

Google Takeout is actually reasonably robust. I create/download one of those fairly regularly.

This is consistent with a recent posting by a non-Googler.

Since you might know - as I've seen the references on social media for this exact occurrence - is this referenced somewhere in T&Cs?

I'm in a layer that just gathers chargeback signals and passes them off to other teams. I have effectively no insight to how the signals are used for your payment profile and your Google account overall. I mainly just pay attention to people issuing their chargeback against Google, and then posting about it on the internet and the fallout they see.

Also, if you see charges from Google on one of your cards but wasn't on your profile, I recommend following this guide: https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/2851610?hl=en

Just realize that’s the end of your google relationship. Same with steam, Sony etc. some pretty horrific stories of people losing access to everything- email, fi phone service, google play services on their phone.

Plenty of these stories:

https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/zndbku/tifu_by_accide...

I’ve heard people following this advice really regret it because they don’t realize how much ties to google. Please make sure folks you are advising understand this.

There was a recent thread here about how chargebacks generally cause companies to delete your accounts and deny you access forever without any way to appeal.