Web/It >>My Check from Google Bounced

I recently got my first payment from Google for running Adsense ads. I never started this site with the purpose of making money, which was pretty hard to do in 1996, but thought it would be at least nice to recoup the hosting cost so I added Google ads a while back. In a somewhat cheesy (first dollar bill moment) I decided to take a picture of the check before depositing it. Little did I know that my check drafted from multi-billion dollar valuated Google.com would come bouncing back to me. And it looks like I’m not the only one either.

I had gotten an email from the bank a few days ago about an item being held in my deposit. The deposit in question had two checks in it. One of the checks was my first payment from a company I had done some contracting for, and the second was from Google. I immediately thought that the small company had screwed me on my first payment, not even considering that the Google check was an issue. Luckily for me the Google check was very small compared to my other payment and was the item being held. I honestly started to laugh when I realized it and decided to call my bank to confirm. Sure enough the check was going to come back to me. Officially it didn’t bounce (but the headline sounds better eh?) but was actually drafted from an account that has since been closed.

So I decide to contact Google to find out what was going on. First off it was pretty hard to find a way to contact them since there are highly visible “contact us” link anywhere to be seen. I had to click on “help” and then search for the word “contact” to then find a link to a contact form. I then sent an email on 4/12 with details of my issue and got a reply 24 hours later referring to me as “Kevin” (my name is Mark) and stating that the check had cleared on 4/11 which was obviously not the case. I have since replied telling them that they may have confused me with someone else (a possible cut and paste snafu…especially if this is widespread) and asked them to look into it further and get back to me. No word yet but this is a bit entertaining and I thought I’d share.