Can Google improve their Payments Risk Management?
My recent personal experience suggests that they could.
Last week I opened a Google Ads account, mainly because I believe it would be a shame to keep this payments glossary buried somewhere on SERP 7.
I live in Berlin and I opened my business bank account with Bunq, a quite cool new-school bank that gives me all I need in a sleek app (no sponsorship, I can only recommend). Bunq is licensed in The Netherlands, and I haven’t had any issues with that so far.
The plot thickens as I’m currently visiting Tel Aviv and I had the brilliant idea of opening my brand new Ads account while abroad. So here I am, signing up for a Google Ads account from an Israeli IP, with a billing address in Germany, using a Dutch payment method, and on top of that, I prefer to keep my OS in US English. Neat.
If you’re at all familiar with risk management solutions, you can probably spot the issue here. To the untrained AI I might look like a fraudster, and not even a good one, which I find borderline offensive. I’d like to think that if I really wanted to scam Google, I could try a tiny bit harder than that. Instead, I’m a mere false positive.
Long story short, my Ads account is pending approval. For 25 days now. It’s queued for manual review, I guess.
The thing is, it’s really not that hard to see the good story behind this transaction:
I’m using the same device I always use. I even logged in to my Google account with 2FA. My first name is Israeli and my last name is German, a decent names dictionary can tell you that. EU residents who have bank accounts in other EU countries are quite common, especially in big cities like Berlin (about 12% of the German population are immigrants, of whom 42% come from other EU countries). And that’s just real time behavioral analytics with enriched data, not even considering all the data Google collected about me in recent years.
Ach, Google. I’m not even angry. I’m disappointed.
