If your customers have to invoke the "legal system" to get around your incompetence, you've failed in every way that matters.

unfortunately, I do not see this as incompetence. Google has made a choice to not put "enough" of their profits in customer service.

That is the action of an incompetent company.

Well, they seem to have come out $2000 ahead on this one. Perhaps they ran the math and realized "the legal system" was intimidating enough that to deter most who would be forced to look to it for help.

To clarify: I was not in the least suggesting that the fact that it might be possible to get your money back from Google by suing them means that Google haven't failed. I was suggesting that it might be a more effective way of getting them to take notice than going through their (clearly rather useless) support channels and blogging about it.

He lives in Austria. Which legal system? And even if it was in the US, you'd be very hard-pressed - as a professional - to justify going through the time and effort required, even in small claims court, for $2k.

For Google, it is a win/win/win situation... until people holler about it.

If you actually expected them to fight it all the way, that might be true. I suspect, though, that "Google found guilty of stealing customer's money" would be an unpalatable enough headline that they'd settle pretty quickly once the threat was made.

But yeah, not being in a country where Google has enough presence to bring them under its jurisdiction could be a problem.

That dude who was on the HuffPost, who sued them for his $700 in missing Adsense money... they fought him in small claims court, even tho their representative was unable to prove a case, they appealed and are dragging it out.

You think they want that kind of precedent known?