There's not enough information to explore potential causality here. All we have is the word of an aggrieved site owner who swears up and down that he was engaged in perfectly unimpeachable conduct. There's no evidence, just whining.
Of course there's more to the story, but I don't think that's the issue here. Google still doesn't have a way to dispute these kinds of things in a timely manner, and that scares people who rely on them for their business.
Summary: Google AdSense closed one account that earned roughly $100 over ~3 months. The account owner finds it suspicious that they canceled his account just before payment.
I cannot comment as to why this occurred, but the headline seems to blow this out of proportion.
1. It seems to be a single adSense account. Not "AdSense accountS".
2. "yesterday AndAppStore received a payment for the first two months of the nearly three months that had not bee paid." (From the thread)
I agree though, Google really needs to buy a company that knows about customer service.
FWIW, Here's my method:
1. Get an AdWords account. Spend money.
2. If you ever have any issues with Google, you now have a phone number with a real google employee at the end, and you're paying them money which makes them more interested.
Bah, I completely didn't see (2) first time around. Google groups really needs a better interface. Even doing "Newer" didn't reveal that post until I searched for it manually.
Has that tactic of getting an AdWords account worked for you? With which product?
I'm evaluating Google Checkout for a project of mine and between this and the Paypal thread, i'm starting to consider alternatives.
I had my complete Google account shutdown last year think it was (Someone tried to login as me a few times unsuccessfully).
The only way I could get it reinstated was because I had a phone number for Adwords, and could call them and say "err, you shut down my account, so I can't give you that money I was giving you".
Perhaps other divisions have good phone numbers and people willing to help, but Adwords seems like the best to me - the ones taking your money.
This happens all the time. Google reviews the sites before the payout and looks for suspicious links, overly exposing ads from many vendors etc etc etc.
They're quite picky really. They're also very picky about pages you dont have controll over yourself (such as user-edited pages..). You can get banned for a comment a user wrote if you're not careful.
As for the timing, it always happens before payout for one clear reason: since so many accounts never earn enough to get paid out it makes no sense to do significant auditing until there's an actual disbursement of cash. Thus the catch that many fraudulent (or suspected fraudulent) accounts don't get flagged until they actually trigger a payment.
