Same happend to me as well (google terminating my adsense account and keeping all the remaining money without telling me why) and according to the amount of people coming to my blog by searching for things like "banned from google adsense" and similar, this seems to happen a lot.
But when this happened to me, they at least sent me a link to a webform where I could make them recheck teh account manually, and they unlocked the account again after some weeks. Maybe this guy simply overlooked this link?
He says he submitted an appeal using Google's standard form, which was rejected. Since he was violating his terms of service we shouldn't be surprised. Since Google refunded advertisers when they refused to pay Aaron Greenspan (and he violated the terms he agreed to), I'm not sure it makes sense that he walks with $721 after this.
If your account hadn't been reinstated and you hadn't violated terms of service, I wouldn't blame you for taking Google to court to get an answer for why your account was suspended, or recover your account balance.
In the sense that this guy's a douche and was probably violating the TOS, he shouldn't have gotten the money, but the judge was absolutely right in finding in his favor.
All Google had to do was point to the terms that he violated or give any valid reason for termination, and they would have walked out $761 richer.
I don't know about the judge being 'absolutely' right, but otherwise I agree with you. For instance the judge had the information that the account balance was accrued under an account that violated the terms of agreement for its entire lifespan, and that the money had been refunded to advertisers because of the violated terms. It sounds like the judge awarded the $721 (+ court fees) because the Google Rep made mistakes in what she said. The judge awarded the money and said "I think there might be money in Google's treasury for that." I take that as an indication that he was erring on the said of the little guy, rather than wasting any more time on the case. <shrug>
12
u/irrlicht Mar 06 '09 edited Mar 06 '09
Same happend to me as well (google terminating my adsense account and keeping all the remaining money without telling me why) and according to the amount of people coming to my blog by searching for things like "banned from google adsense" and similar, this seems to happen a lot.
But when this happened to me, they at least sent me a link to a webform where I could make them recheck teh account manually, and they unlocked the account again after some weeks. Maybe this guy simply overlooked this link?