If you are big enough to matter to Google, you will have a legal department. Your legal department will resolve this stuff by contacting Google's legal department. Even as a small customer, detailing the issue and contacting the general counsel may get you some mileage. Getting stuck in the automated appeal denial loops for these companies is unlikely to ever get you anywhere. But legal > tech when it comes to ultimate authority to resolve disputes.
I also wonder if discrimination plays into this. As in, I don't know if it's legal to exclude certain payment methods. For example, in the US there's a law that businesses can't charge a premium for credit over cash, but there was an exception for gas stations to offer a cash discount.
Brex itself might want to confront Google about the legalities of discriminating against their customers.
This has become a rampant enough problem that a startup could make a lot of money acting on behalf of businesses which have experienced losses due to large corporate behemoths selectively denying them service for dubious reasons.
Also if Google really does control 90% of the ad market, then this sort of situation is just exactly the ammo needed for an antitrust case. Google should be paying more attention to this for its own sake. Of course, with the US Supreme Court how it is, Google's probably confident that absolutely nothing will happen to it. If someone can read all of this and not understand what a great tragedy that is, then I just don't know what else to say. It's probably over and we may never see ourselves free of monopoly abuses like this.
> in the US there's a law that businesses can't charge a premium for credit over cash
This was actually typically just part of the contract merchants signed with credit card providers and was abandoned around 2013 after a law suit, AFAIK. There were about a dozen state laws that prohibited it, but most were thrown out after Expressions Hair Design v. Schneiderman said it might violate the First Amendment.
It's obviously legal to exclude certain payment methods. Costco only takes Visa payments. Lots of places refuse checks or high-value bills. Some places don't take Discover or Amex, especially in the EU. Essentially nobody takes cryptocurrencies or payments in kind. A few states have laws that say businesses must take cash, but otherwise you have the freedom to require payment as you like. I can't walk into your store and force you to accept Iraqi dinars as payment.
Ah thanks for clarifying! If this whole incident comes down to payment type (as the top comment indicates) then we should probably screen all poor service experiences through filters like that. Like with computer bugs, someone should be able to reproduce them while troubleshooting before jumping to possible fixes.
That said, it's disingenuous of companies to give the wrong reason(s) for why they deny service. If companies can't give an exact reason in writing, then that's the part that feels like discrimination to me. It would be like discriminating on the basis of gender/race/etc and then giving a bogus reason as to why.
And then if they fall back to the common "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" like the signs we see on storefronts, we should be able to hire a competitor instead. But with so many companies controlling > 50% of every market, that's not always a viable option. So those companies specifically should move to the top of the list for antitrust investigation.
Ironically, the right of refusal seems to be part of anti-discrimination laws:
I wonder if reporting them to the FTC for fraud would have any effect? They're telling people that there is suspicious payment activity when no payments were made or even tried. That's simply a lie.
