It was in combination with a lack of payment history. So if they had been paying it would not have triggered but they had been working off of credits instead. I think this point addresses your concern that paying customers should be allowed to mine.
I ran some really long compute jobs on GCP (100% CPU for weeks across many vCPUs) with credits without getting flagged. I was evaluating FFTW performance for a project. Perhaps GCP could tell I was calling into FFTW and not mining so they decided it wasn't fraud?
It makes sense for a company like DO to not allow crypto miners to use credits. Or else they would develop elaborate systems to create fake accounts and spin them up to mine.
Google can afford to eat the cost and perhaps has better heuristics to detect mining. And they definitely have better data to detect a single user signing up for multiple accounts.
Perhaps, or they viewed credits as payment history? I’m not defending the algorithm as even DO has said it was a false-positive. I just wanted to point out that this wasn’t an attack by DO on paying for crypto. That it specifically was trying to look at non-payers.
