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Comment by heavymark | Hacker News Reader

If you cancelled your account and you were still being charged, did you reach out to your credit card company to let them know about the fradulent charges? They should be able to block billing on their end, once they contacted google's billing to verify you cancelled your account.

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I'd consider this an absolute method of last resort for any of the large integrated providers like Amazon/Google/etc. There are reports where people have done seemingly legitimate chargebacks and while they get their money back, they also get all their myriad accounts closed that are associated with Amazon and new accounts made with work emails/etc also get closed.

Chargebacks seem to be appropriate when you truly no longer want to do any future business at all with a particular company - it might not be limited to just "G suite" or "GCP", or "AWS" or "Amazon", but the whole conglomeration.

Obviously YMMV, I'm sure people have had divergent experiences with this. I've always personally been able to get things resolved eventually through chat/email/phone, but I trust that not everyone has the same luck I do.

This is a useful litmus test for "is it too big?" trust busting purposes, by the way: if the majority of customers aren't doing chargebacks for the fear of losing access to company's services, then yeah, it's too big.

Brilliant, yet simple.

Was I willing to cut off the New York Times like this when all other means of canceling my subscription failed? Sure! Result: powerful, but not in need of breaking up.

Would I be willing to do this with YouTube, for fear of what it might do to my Gmail account, a service that is seemingly completely unrelated? Good God no, which is one reason I never signed up for a subscription. Result: absolutely needs to be broken up.

Yeah, this seems like the obvious next step. No need to worry about ruining your account's standing if you've already closed it, and the chargeback should hopefully alert someone at Google to look into your status.

Just don't try to use that card number to sign up for any other Google product.

On the other hand, that charge might just be the outstanding balance when you cancelled, so it might be legit.

Yeah that's what's really annoying, I can't contact support to figure out if the charge is legit or not. So I can either eat the cost or file a charge back and potentially deal with a bigger fallout on my other accounts that I have with Google. It's a shitty situation either way.

I wanted to speak to Google Support first and figure it out and make sure I wasn't misunderstanding the charge, but alas I could not contact support without a billing account active, so yes will be contacting my CC company.

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