12-Year-Old Boy Gets $100K Bill From Google After Confusing Adwords With Adsense (theregister.co.uk)

The names Google gives to its services can be a bit confusing at times, especially since there are so many of them. For example, Adwords and Adsense look and sound very similar but they deal with two different transaction types. While Adwords deals with spending money, Adsense deals with earning money. A 12-year-old boy in Spain managed to confused the two services and ended up with a bill of 100,000 euros ($111,490). The Register reports: Jose Javier, 12, had signed up for Google's Adwords program in order to make money from advertisements placed alongside YouTube videos of his band, the Torrevieja llamada Los Salerosos -- en ingles, the Torrevieja Fun Guys -- named after the Alicante town in which he lives. Unfortunately, for the young musician, Google's AdWords program is for those wishing to advertise at cost, rather than run advertisements for profit. According to a report from Spanish daily El Pais, Jose and a friend planned to buy instruments, play music, get rich and buy a mansion by subscribing to the service. By early September the account was being billed by Google, receiving charges which reportedly rose quickly from an initial 15 euros ($16.72) to 19,700 euros ($21,960.57) at a time until the amount owed hit six figures. Google's statement noted that AdWords has age restrictions in place and encouraged families to familiarize itself with its Safety Center, but the boy's mother complained to El Pais that it was too easy for her son to make the purchases from Google, requiring him only to provide his savings account details, which he did in mid-August. Thankfully, Google was kind enough to cancel the outstanding balance on its Adwords service.

Comments

How is that possible?

[hcs_$reboot]

I used Adwords a few years ago, as a kind of test. At the time, I set a limit of $100, thus depending on how many people click the ad, the limit is reached more or less quickly. But in any case, $100 was the maximum I had to pay.

Adwords billing thresholds are well below 100K

[Anonymous Coward]

Something is fishy about this story. Google Adwords in Spain uses an Automatic Payment system which requires a credit card and which demands payments when the new account reaches a charge of 50 Euros. Google Adwords stops all account advertising if the bill is not paid immediately. The "billing threshold" increases over time as payments are made but typically for most accounts the "billing threshold" will reach the point where a payment is demanded for every 500 Euros of account activity or every 30 days whichever comes first. The Google Adwords payment system is set up to avoid ever getting into the situation described in the article about this boy. Those much rarer accounts which have pay-per-click advertisements that cost well above this billing threshold have safeguards in place to ensure that payments are going to be made before Adwords allows the account to engage in placing those ads. This article smells not only fishy but also tastes like baloney.