alt Hacker NewsSeems like the real problem is something about his account or credit card tripped some fraud detectors and he got stuck in a part of the system designed to prevent credit card fraud rather than facilitate legitimate use. I can certainly imagine that Google gets a lot of chargebacks from people who had their credit card numbers stolen to mine bitcoin or whatever on Google Cloud.
Having moved from one country to another, I tripped all kinda of anti fraud systems and the only way out was to share my ID with every other company. It’s annoying but one common thing is that anti fraud systems seem to require humans in the loop, so it’s better to give up and get back to it next day.
The most annoying company I dealt with was Blizzard. I just wanted to play a game but it took days of back and forth, meanwhile I started to play something else and lost interest.