Requesting a chargeback from your credit card will get your account PERMANENTLY BANNED on several websites and online services, INCLUDING GOOGLE.
This means ALL YOUR E-MAILS WILL BE GONE if you use Google Mail (i.e. if you have a @gmail.com e-mail address). Your Youtube channel will be gone (i.e. all your data on Youtube, including your comments, likes, playlists, uploaded videos, etc.). If you have an Android smartphone and you downloaded apps from Google Play Store, that information will be gone too. If you are a webmaster, you'll lose access to Google Search Console, Google AdSense, Google Ads, etc. You'll lose access to your Google Wallet.
To be fair, I haven't actually confirmed if all of this happens at once or if it's possible to be banned from only some services, but if your Google account is banned, it's ALL BANNED. And, as odd as it sounds, there is reason to believe this is a LIFETIME BAN, meaning you can't create another account because if they find out they'll ban that account too. You, as a person, will be banned from ever using Google's services again. So it's not your account that will be banned, it will be you as a customer. They will not want to enter another contract with you, so you can't use their services again.
The same thing applies to pretty much any other company that accepts credit card payments. If you request a chargeback, they will simply ban you for life.
In particular, there have been cases of representatives telling customers they can request a chargeback without issue and then the customer GETTING BANNED ANYWAY because it was a company policy and the representative shouldn't have said that, so be warned!
Precautions
When you have a dispute with an online company, contact customer support first to get a refund and ABSOLUTELY NEVER attempt a chargeback.
Okay, you can chargeback. But doing it means you'll never be able to use a service from that company ever again in your life, and you probably want to avoid that situation. You will live for decades on this planet. Tech companies often start offering new services and products as time goes on. It's very possible that in the future you'll want to use a service from that company, and when that happens you won't want to have burned that bridge.
Although I don't have a lot of experience with dealing with customer support from tech companies, there was one time I thought I had cancelled Netflix, and I hadn't, or it had been reactivated by a family member by accident, so I had been charged one or more months of subscription even though I wasn't using it anymore. It was so long ago I don't really remember how many months it was, it could have been only one, but it could have more. Regardless, at the time I contacted customer support, and during my talk with support I asked them to check if the account had watched any videos recently, to which I was told "no." So I asked for a refund. And I got the refund. And that was it. I wasn't permabanned or anything. I just got the refund for a service I didn't use, cancelled the subscription, and lived happily ever after.
If you're lucky, hopefully the same thing will happen to you.
Why Permanent Bans?
When you request a chargeback from a credit card company, what you are doing is actually accusing the merchant (i.e. the person or company you sent money to) of fraud.
This means if you request a chargeback for Youtube Premium, for example, you're telling the credit card company that Google defrauded you. That they took your money and didn't give you the product or service that you paid for.
Which, to be fair... [Youtube Premium "Downloads" aren't Actually "Downloads"].
This is a very serious accusation to make. Although I doubt it could happen to Google, it's possible that a merchant with lots of chargebacks will become unable to receive credit card payments. Some online business depend almost entirely on credit card payments, so this could be a business-ending issue.
If they didn't take this seriously and permanently banned you, that would mean they would sell other things to you, giving you the opportunity to request other chargebacks, jeopardizing their reputation even further. That's why they simply cut ties—to not give you the opportunity to destroy their business.
For businesses, chargebacks can result in financial losses, damage to their reputation, higher fees from payment processors, and even losing the ability to accept credit card payments.
https://stripe.com/en-br/resources/more/chargeback-fraud-101 (accessed 2024-12-07)
According to Mastercard, a credit card company, there are three common reasons for chargebacks:
Here are three common reasons customers dispute card transactions:
https://b2b.mastercard.com/news-and-insights/blog/what-is-a-chargeback/ (accessed 2024-12-07)
- Fraud—Someone unauthorised to use the card made the disputed charge.
- “Friendly Fraud”—When someone disputes a charge they think is fraudulent but actually isn’t. The most common reason for friendly fraud is transaction confusion—when the cardholder doesn’t recognise a charge on their statement that they or someone else in their household actually made.
- Service issues—Although consumers would ideally contact merchants directly when they have service issues, such as shipping delays or receiving damaged product, some people simply dispute the purchase transaction in order to get a statement credit.
In other words:
- You got defrauded.
- You have no idea a chargeback is a serious accusation or got confused.
- You really should have resolved this with the merchant instead.
Observe that when you use chargebacks to resolve issues with a merchant, you haven't actually resolved any issues with the merchant, you just took your money back and shoved that responsibility onto the credit card company.
The credit card company now has to figure out whether you used your chargeback ability the correct way or in a mistaken way, to figure out whether the merchant is innocent or guilty, and to figure out whether you are exploiting the system or you just have no idea what you're doing.
I hope this warning will save you from a huge headache later in your life!
Quotes
[...] the representative I spoke to said I could just chargeback with my credit card. So I did.
Today, my Google account was banned. 15 years of history gone.
I went on the support chat for the umpteenth time and they told me because I did a chargeback, the rules are that my account will be banned. I asked why they suggest for me to do a chargeback, when they could have just refunded themselves, and they said the support I spoke to should never have suggested it but rules are rules.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/zndbku/tifu_by_accidentally_buying_two_google_pixels_and/, "December 16, 2022" (accessed 2024-12-07)
Hello,
I just got an email saying I was permanently banned from EA. [...] I bought the game after because it was on sale and tried to talk to support to refund the membership purchase, they couldn't help me and I specifically asked them will I get banned if I try to charge back but I got no clear answer. Anyway I chargebacked the membership purchase and I just noticed today that it chargedback the game purchase too. I got in contact with my card company and had them reverse the game chargeback but they couldn't reverse the membership chargeback because the case was closed. Is what I did enough to get unbanned?
https://answers.ea.com/t5/General-Discussion/Permanently-Banned-for-Chargeback/m-p/12364082, "March 2023" (accessed 2024-12-07)
A happy ending in these dooming times:
Account suspension for chargeback, paying the fee, and still not getting account back..
[...] For all those wondering here is the update. It’s since been 3 days since I posted so here’s what happened. That day I called Sony once more to figure this whole mess out. I was on the phone with them for about 35 minutes getting it figured it out. I was more skeptical about passing off a gift card to get rid of this problem but I can assure you it was true! My account is back!
https://www.reddit.com/r/PS5/comments/19397q0/comment/khozm2y/, "January 10, 2024" (accessed 2024-12-07)
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