I have had nearly this exact experience, marketing a small SaaS.
A sudden ads suspension arrived, with no explanation beyond "suspicious payments". This from the same billing account used with GSuite, Domains, GCP; and from a business that was having no trouble running ads on FB, Twitter, and Reddit. "How silly, but I'm sure we can get it fixed".. I thought.
Like OP I'm also a Xoogler, so after two rounds of unsuccessful appeals through the front door (including updating my payment account to a hard card, providing articles of incorporation, and so on, to no avail), I figured it was time to call in my first ever favor. Surely one of my old-timer engineer buddies could thunk a ticket somewhere and maybe we'd help them fix a bug in some automated system in the process.
But the Google of 2022 is far different than the earlier days. It seems individual employees, even well-placed engineers, have incredibly and increasingly limited agency to fix things outside their immediate purview; a wiki about internal escalations for ads suspension stated they were no longer accepted, vaguely for reasons of "compliance".
On the bright side, the whole episode made me rethink and ultimately diversify our technology dependency on Google. I was naive not to do so more seriously and earlier.
I'm feel reasonably sure that Google has introduced some kind of internal policy against employees helping out or publicly commenting on such matters.
Anyone who has read the comments of a few of these types of articles on HN over the years might recall that in the past, there was almost invariably would be a comment starting with "Hi, Googler here!" offering some help. I don't recall seeing any comments like that in the past 6 months or longer.
Understandable to prohibit public commentary/shows of assistance; but that wasn't at issue here.
What I sought was someone to escalate the details in a ticket & get eyes on a likely false positive -- from a very friendly/technical customer (me). The buddies I asked, admittedly not on Ads risk engineering, looked around, hit walls, and gave up.
Given the amount of chaos the insider help can cause, I'm not surprised they would do that. There was a video I can't find now doing rounds on twitter with girls saying how they used relationships/sex with instagram employees to get their accounts unblocked. Companies are likely aiming for more accountability than that.
Ads fraud is generally a no-op from internal escalations though, something that personally I won't touch unless I know the person.
As I see it, Ads generally won't ban an account that has historical spend even if they see something lightly suspicious, and that's where the business is. With smaller spenders, new accounts, and various other flags, your risk of cancellation is _significantly_ higher, but Google's risk is lower since they didn't have the spend already.
Every company should have a clear policy against jumping into these kinds of support claims outside of established channels, because they are the main vector for social engineering.
There are reasons that accounts get suspended and whether or not those reasons are perfect, having humans reach in and jerk around with the system is much less perfect.
I agree & didn't mean to imply otherwise. They should focus on making their system (including appeals via the official channels) work properly rather than doing support via HN.
I've tried to have my Google Play developer account unsuspended by reaching out to a friend at Google and also had no luck. My initial ban was for "After a regular review we have determined that your app interferes with or accesses another service or product in an unauthorized manner. This violates the provision of your agreement with Google referred to above". I had two different apps using this API so that earned me two strikes in one go and then a ban for 'multiple violations'.
So much of many people's digital identity depends on Google/Apple (or FB/Twitter/etc). This is a huge dependency problem.
Clearly Google doesn't want to do support, but this seems like an opportunity to me. If they offer in-house (US based) support that can actually resolve the issue for a fee, they would improve countless users' lives. Actual support would be infinitely better than the current black hole of oblivion any time an automated processes flags something.
( I realize paying for support isn't popular, but it seems like the only way 1.) Google would care about helping you and 2.) reduce support ticket volume. )
It is great that engineers can choose between multiple services, but advertisers have far fewer options. Getting banned from Google means you lose Google search, Youtube, almost all of the display ads on the open web and most of the ad slots on android apps.
It is devastating and there is nothing you can do about it.
I understand where you are coming from, but good luck running a business without advertising. Especially if you want to create a new business.
The main problem is that most advertising is annoying or irrelevant to the user. Google search ads are usually the least hated of all ads because they are relevant and not annoying. If other ad systems could do a better job of adopting those qualities then people would not mind advertising as much.
We decided to focus on other online acquisition channels, FB and Instagram working best. For this product, it turns out offline channels convert better anyway - so it was a suspension we could live with, despite not understanding it.
But I could imagine how distressing this would be for a business more dependent on search. And you can find lots of small business owners and indie hackers with such stories if you start looking..
A sudden ads suspension arrived, with no explanation beyond "suspicious payments". This from the same billing account used with GSuite, Domains, GCP; and from a business that was having no trouble running ads on FB, Twitter, and Reddit. "How silly, but I'm sure we can get it fixed".. I thought.
Like OP I'm also a Xoogler, so after two rounds of unsuccessful appeals through the front door (including updating my payment account to a hard card, providing articles of incorporation, and so on, to no avail), I figured it was time to call in my first ever favor. Surely one of my old-timer engineer buddies could thunk a ticket somewhere and maybe we'd help them fix a bug in some automated system in the process.
But the Google of 2022 is far different than the earlier days. It seems individual employees, even well-placed engineers, have incredibly and increasingly limited agency to fix things outside their immediate purview; a wiki about internal escalations for ads suspension stated they were no longer accepted, vaguely for reasons of "compliance".
On the bright side, the whole episode made me rethink and ultimately diversify our technology dependency on Google. I was naive not to do so more seriously and earlier.