Google Makes Dev Pay $11,000 Even Though THEY Tell Him He Was Hacked
This is one of those buyer beware situations.
Between June 7 and 8, a dev’s account was charged $11,000+, mostly for Gemini image creation, something he does not do.
The developer, Charles, says doesn’t have any workflow that generates AI images.
Google then suspended his account, saying that it was “engaged in abusive activity consistent with hijacked resources.”
The notification told Charles to report any concerns if he thought the account was hacked. He did and then disabled the compromised account and revoked the key.
But here is the important part.
Google refused to refund the charges.
Complaints about charges from fraud are, apparently, not uncommon among Google Cloud users.
TO MAKE MATTERS WORSE, THERE IS NO GOOGLE MECHANISM TO CAP GOOGLE CLOUD SPENDING – PROBABLY THE NUMBER ONE REASON NOT TO EVER USE GOOGLE CLOUD SERVICES.
Google does have some kludgy ways to try and get around this basic screwup on their part but they say if you implement them some resources may be irretrievably deleted.
Google has implemented an experimental feature for Gemini that does cap expenses just for Gemini, but it operates at least ten minutes behind real time and they say that you are liable for expenses in that window, even if it exceeds your spending cap.
Of course, Google AUTOMATICALLY upgrades you to the next usage tier as your usage grows to make sure that they can grab as much of your money as possible.
So it would appear, if you are a Google customer, you are pretty much on your own and Google is only interested in protecting their pocketbook, not you as a paying customer.
It is unclear what security protections he had in place, but the lack of an ability to set a spending cap on pay as you go services would, to me, rule out using Google services that fall into that category.
Now that I am done beating up Google, check all of your other cloud providers.
Many of those are fixed price monthly services – you pay $X a month and you get whatever. But more and more of these services are realizing that they can extract way more money from you by moving to a usage based model. An example is Anthropic and Fable. It is moving to a token based model on July 7. You need to make you understand what you have agreed to.
Credit: The Register
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