JESSE JONES: Small business owner surprised at half-million charge from GoogleMelissa Mitchell works for a company that helps integrate homes with smart devices, and part of her gig is creating online ads.“Well, so my available credit limit is $20,000, and my current balance is $500,000,” Melissa said. “I’ve gone $480,000 over my credit limit.”“It does shock me that Bank of America let something go through without any sort of protections in place for their customer,” Melissa said.
Melissa said the company’s Google ads dashboard showed the transaction was only supposed to be $5,000. “It really just seemed as though the computer had dropped a decimal point when the transaction happened,” she said.“The first interaction that we sent out was literally just an automated response,” Melissa said. “So, to know that my company’s operations were going to be just held frozen for 48 hours before we could even do anything and have no phone call, phone number to call or anything like that. It’s just incredibly frustrating.
“Due to a technical issue last month by a payment processor, a small number of customers were overcharged. We worked with the payment processor to initiate a full refund to the affected customers as quickly as possible; all customers have been refunded. There is no action needed on the customers’ part.”
“I feel like Google probably doesn’t care,” Melissa said. “Even though I know that we spend a lot of money on Google ads, a lot of people spend a lot of money on Google ads. And that’s part of the problem, is that the company is so big that there is no human element to what we’re doing there.”“Small businesses really should not have to deal with this because they have enough to worry about in a time of recession,” Melissa said. “They have to worry about keeping their cash flow flush.
Anybody else dislike the “For You” tab anyway?