HN Explorer

Google will not let me pay an invoice they sent me

88 points by highwayman47 ↗ HN
I signed up for the trial of Google Workspace.

I entered my credit card information but my "Payments Account" required ID verification, so I submitted my ID.

I then cancelled my trial of Google Workspace, accidentally 1 day after the trial expiration.

I was not allowed to pay the outstanding balance of $1.16 at the time because my "Payments Account" had not been verified.

I closed my Google Workspace account so I wouldn't incur further charges and figured I'd just pay the invoice later.

2 weeks later they invoice me for the $1.16. However, I cannot pay without signing in to my cancelled Google Workspace account. I do not want to re-activate the account, though I try unsuccessfully with the instructions provided to me by support.

Support now tells me that after 20 days a deleted account cannot be recovered. I contact collections to pay the invoice but they "do not handle these types of accounts".

I am concerned this will effect my excellent credit.

I have tried multiple times to pay but support does not provide a means to do so.

60 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] thread
piperly
They are too big to care.
dusted
Thing about computers is, they don't care, either way, an outstanding invoice is an outstanding invoice. The number is != 0 and so the machinery grinds on.
lb1lf
Which, of course, is why any sane system developer would ask the client 'How small is too small?', then have the computer ignore, say, any claims below $5 or whatever.

Or, better - accumulate claims until the sum is of a magnitude it makes sense to bill.

tialaramex
Years ago (maybe 25 years ago?), an outfit in the UK (Mint maybe?) decided to launch their new credit card with two gimmicks. One was just a weird shape, hey it's a curved card, pointless but different. But the other was a financial gimmick. The first 12 months are 0% APR and it has a direct cash reward scheme.

Some people I know abused this very heavily, they immediately took out a card, and used a mechanism to transfer all the credit (e.g. £1250) to a high interest period savings account. Sit on it for a year, then pay back the £1250, keep the savings interest (actually it's a little more complicated to do this right, but it's automatable) and get cash back. Not exactly riches, but hey it's free capital. Subsequent gimmick cards ensured you could not do this.

I didn't feel right doing that, I just used the card to buy stuff, as intended, and filled up the credit limit over about 8 months. So when the 0% period is up, I pay everything and I get my cash back, but it's in the form of a credit against the account, so I have a card I intend to cease using but with like the price of a meal in credit. So I went to the pub. Burger and a coke, alas it comes to like 4 pence more than my credit, and I figure it'll auto-pay and then I'll destroy the card and forget about it next month.

Nope, as well as being gracious enough to accept the (apparently eye-wateringly expensive) acquisition cost of giving all those people free credit for a year the card company also wrote off my 4 pence balance, I just got a letter saying "Because of this low balance we have written off the debt". So that was surprisingly pleasant of them.

I didn't ever use their card again, but it did mean I had positive things to say about them, which is worth 4 pence at least.

brazzledazzle
Perhaps there are financial complexities to carrying that much interest free credit forward since they would be doing it in aggregate across all accounts.
lb1lf
-That's a fair point, I guess it would look bad in their annual reports even if the cost of collecting that money would be larger than the actual owed amount itself.
d13
I had a similar problem with Skype. I was being billed a monthly subscription for an account I could not log into and for which Microsoft could not confirm my identity. I asked my bank to block payment , which they did, and which worked for a month, until Microsoft clued in and simply swapped in the same subscription under a different name, which snuck past my bank’s block. The final solution was canceling my card and issuing a new one, which of course resulted in endless other problems.
Mordisquitos
Assuming you did originally create the account into which you could not log in, then surely the part where "Microsoft swapped in the same subscription under a different name" was literal fraud on the part of Microsoft. That is unless the guilty party was somebody else who had created the account using your stolen card details and was making use of it.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
CoastalCoder
I'm curious, if Google reported this to a credit rating agency, would they be liable for defamation?
rightbyte
How would you know? Arent those reports opaque ML with a scalar result?

GDPR should allow you to extract that info in some countries. But I dunno about the US.

rat9988
I thought credit rating agencies work with identified data.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
dusted
I've tried using the GDPR rights, it does not work, they won't extract anything, just scribble in a mail "yea, we have so and so on you" but won't actually give you any actual data containing any particular detail.
thisNeeds2BeSad
OP is refering to the only way to get support from google or even attention. Produce keywords that flag it as a liability or lawsuit issue. \n Ironically, highly paid lawyers are googles only reliable reachable support.\n

Sometimes when you try to gamble a system and the system can gamble you right back, you pay dearly, in this case by having highly paid lawyers do telephone support.

CoastalCoder
Actually you're going me to much credit :)

I was just curious about that corner of U.S. law.

tnuc
It will end up in the too hard basket and get deleted. Don't worry about it.

No credit agency will touch a $1.16 bill

safety1st
Realistically the main thing OP has to worry about is this somehow getting his Google account flagged and locked by some buggy algorithm at a later date. Nothing involving a human would ever come about this, but it's Google we're talking about.
heretogetout
And/or a friend of theirs getting their account banned because they used OP's wifi one day.
ageitgey
Probably not with Google, but you never know.

I moved once and got a $10 final gas bill sent to the old address that I never knew about. The company was scummy and added a $10 late fee after 30 days. Then another $10 late fee after 30 days, etc, until it was around $120 and then they put it on my credit report and sent it to a collector.

This was like 20 years ago, but scummy fly-by-night companies will do this.

wolfpack_mick
This happened to me with employment insurance just a month ago. Invoice went to the old address. I paid the invoice 4 days after the due date, but not the €10 late fee that i didn't know about. So they put the €10 late fee to debt collection and i had to pay €40.

What enraged me most was that that the insurance company supposedly didn't know my new address, although they are my landlord at the new address...

The debt collection of course had no problem finding out my new address.

ChoGGi
Does your mail service not have a temporary forwarding service available?
dazc
This is fairly common practice with utility companies and banks. I don't think Google have latched on to this scam yet but I'm sure they will eventually.

AFAIK (in the UK, at least), for an account to affect your credit record, without it actually going to court, would need for you to have signed a credit agreement at the outset.

Nextgrid
> AFAIK (in the UK, at least), for an account to affect your credit record, without it actually going to court, would need for you to have signed a credit agreement at the outset

I don't believe that's correct as scummy telecoms use the threat of ruining your credit to keep people paying even if they delivery no/subpar service.

dazc
Telecoms companies do usually require a signed credit agreement. Which is how they are able to make these threats.
dontbenebby
>No credit agency will touch a $1.16 bill

You would be surprised how detail oriented rich white people suffering from narcissistic injury can be.

cookiengineer
Have written evidence, and take screenshots of the websites and datetimes where you tried that.

Have all documentation in a way that it holds up in court (a phone call is worthless, but an email history goes a long way), so that in worst case when this escalates you can prove that there was no means of payment available.

kevincox
The problem is less likely being actually sued but just your credit score being damanged which there is no formal recourse against.
sebastien_b
Lawsuit for defamation (or is it slander-I never remember)? The company tells someone else (credit bureau, collectors) that you’re a “bad payer” (false), which causes you tangible harm (affects credit).
namlem
Not worth the cost
sebastien_b
Depends on the payout. This case seems pretty clear.
adwww
Similar happened with me on AWS about 10 years ago - ended up with my account being shut down.

I managed to exceed a free tier and get charged $0.01 USD for S3 storage. They kept trying to take the payment from my card, but my bank couldn't process it as 1c is less than 1 GBP penny.

corobo
Hah I thought I was the only one to manage a <0.01 billing situation. The account did eventually got suspended but I was able to unlock it by logging in and clearing the balance manually (luckily by that point it was a full penny or two)

During this I found out you can link multiple AWS accounts to another for billing purposes, should stop me missing it in future, just in case it helps anyone to know it's possible :)

omegalulw
Did support not help? If the account was critical why not spend $1?
adwww
The account wasn't critical, mostly just me learning AWS.

I'm not sure there is / was a way to pay an arbitrary amount - unless you mean just turning on an instance for a while to generate a full $1 of costs in order to be able to make the payment.

peyton
FICO 8 scores ignore collections under $100 I believe.
tacitusarc
I have been hit by a <100$ collection bill due to an error by Comcast.

Fortunately I filed a complaint through the AG and it was quickly cleared up. It turns out emails from the AG have far more impact than emails from a random person.

Neil44
Post them a cheque :)
ls15
I think this is a great suggestion. Or even just send cash.

I would make sure to use certified mail, to document everything, to make it crystal clear what the payment is for and to send it to the right department...

The ball now has been played back to Google, so one of their employees needs to deal with the mail and OP clearly is in a position to reasonably claim to have paid what they owe, so they can get it out of their mind until Google reacts or does not.

himinlomax
Make that a registered letter or whatever it's called in English, so that you can prove you sent something if they lose the cheque -- as they can be expected to in this case.
fxtentacle
Had the same issue with Amazon AWS. They used to deduct the invoices from my bank account. But the last invoice when the project ended was only $1. They refused to do the bank deduction claiming that they only allow that for >$100. They also refused to allow alternative payment methods, because they were by definition unverified. I emailed support, they apologized profoundly via email after about a minute that they can't solve the problem. 3 months later someone finally called us back.
bob1029
I’ve gotten to a (privileged) point where I don’t give a flying shit about my credit score now. The way I deal with these kinds of inhuman disputes involves removing my payment/contact information from the vendor’s system, filing any applicable chargebacks, and then entirely ghosting them.

Maybe it will come back to bite me in the ass one day, but I honestly don’t care anymore. Mostly, because no one cares about me as a person anymore. I am just yet-another consumer to be exploited as much as possible.

dontbenebby
I'm not privileged, but I also don't care.

If you're of Italian descent, one option is to verify you're eligible for a passport Jus Sanguis, document it, then make a plan to spend the two-ish years it will take to process the application in a safe location:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis

Italy recognizes dual citizenship, and is in NATO.

This is not treason, it is a legitimate response to persistent refusals by the US federal government to cease engaging in selective prosecution at the expense of cryptowarriors like myself who did not choose to be born, did not volunteer for the military, and have felt trapped behind enemy lines since 9/11 with no end in sight to that "Eternal September 11th".

(The millennials are not your slaves, we are not required to be your caregivers, and lack of action is not violence -- we will respect your boundaries so well, less intelligent folks will mistake our use of technology for witchcraft or whatever.)

My71staccount
How is this related?
dontbenebby
Because I'm primarily on HN to seek employment, and I deleted my Amazon account after issues similar to the ones in the OP.

It is frustrating to me that if I exercise my right to "take my business elsewhere", and then, due to unemployment, have more free time to use my 1st amendment protected free expression, folks seem to seek out what I say and take offense at it, when if I had something to occupy my time I'd probably be on the internet less.

Does that help give you context? I can clarify further as needed.

colpabar
>Because I'm primarily on HN to seek employment

you should really rethink your strategy here

anakaine
Agreed.

The pattern of thing displayed here is wild.

Brian_K_White
This has bugged me forever. You are expected to uphold integrity with them (all the thems) while they don't with you. They expect you to treat them like your neighborhood baker, while to them you aren't even a customer but the flour.
WesternWind
You can mail checks, you know. Certified mail, pictures for documentation.

Then you'll see if they take the money from your account.

rladd
This happened to me About eight years ago I think, and I was finally able to get someone on chat at the time who escalated it and was able to get it resolved. I think I needed to re-open the account in order to get the chat though.
Crosseye_Jack
Google currently owe me a couple of bucks, problem is every time I complete their form to receive the refund it errors out.

So I have a few bucks just sitting there doing nothing because it’s not like it’s an account credit which will be used as part payment on my next charge. So the money just sits there.

https://i.imgur.com/QgjYLcD.jpeg

(Was a failed YouTube super chat, they took the cash but failed to process the message, so decided to refund me, but that failed too - was only a couple of bucks so not like I’m losing any sleep over it)

tothrowaway
That happened to me. After a few years, Google sent the money to some state agency. I filled out a form and submitted evidence that it was my money. Eventually I got a check in the mail from the bureaucrats. I was surprised it actually worked.
Crosseye_Jack
If it was a larger sum I would prob chase it up, I have recurring payments to Google/Youtube (Mainly YouTube Premium), so not sure why they don't just deduct the balance they owe me from my next payment to them. Guessing with an entity as large as Google, billing is a huge machine in of itself. Just annoying to have a alert in pay.google.com I can't get rid off.
Kon-Peki
It really depends on which state you live in (you said "bucks" so it's a good guess that you are in the US). Some are surely better than others in this regard. I got about $50 back from Illinois and the paperwork took less than 5 minutes to complete - so we're talking about $625 per hour for my efforts. Definitely worth it. If you only stand to get $3, that would be closer to $36 per hour - still a pretty good return on your time though perhaps not at the top of your list of priorities ;)
lp0_on_fire
Is there a physical address on the invoice?

Write a paper check (or get a moneyorder / cashiers check), attach a copy of the invoice and a quick letter explaining that their system won't let you pay any other way, then go to the post office, send the whole thing by certified mail and be done with it.

namlem
Honestly, given that it's only $1.16, I'd probably try mailing a check with the account name in the hopes that someone figures it out. Though I suspect they wouldn't and would just mail it back or lose it.
bbulkow
Your credit score matters far less than you think.

Your credit score is maintained by a bunch of goons in a protection racket. 'Shame if anything would happen to that fine credit score, let me 'protect' it for you".

Unfortunately, there are few legal standards in this area. Any business can report that you have not paid something.

Write a letter to google's corporate address with all your evidence, enclose a literal paper check, keep a copy of everything. Point out in your cover letter that you are discharging your responsibilities especially regarding collections, and collections will be considered an illegal action. If it comes back and harms you, you have cause of action and documentation. Take whatever action is appropriate for harm (apparently arbitration can be really good for small cases like this, less hurdles, more getting the companies money).

And just don't get bent about it.

masukomi
> Your credit score matters far less than you think.

... uh... this is the worst financial advice i have ever heard with regards to someone living in the US.

credit scores aren't _just_ about if you get a loan or a credit card. They're used to determine if you're a safe hire. They're used when calculating your insurance rate (house / car / whatever). They're used when determining if they should rent an apartment to you.

I'm not saying these are _wise_ uses of it, but they _are_ uses of it.

schappim
Sometimes you have to do things old school. Post them the $1.16 via registered post to (Accounts Payable, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043, USA. (650) 253-0000). Do not include a return address (so no return to sender) just an the invoice number. Cash is still legal tender.