Next use a credit card. Basically thanks to credit card laws the bank will go tell google to f off and give you your money back. Debit cards don't have the same protection, but just call your bank or OCS (https://www.occ.treas.gov/). They have a little more bite.
His debit card ended up declining it anyway, but that's not the point. The point is Google thinks he owes them thousands of dollars, and a collection agency is hounding him for the money.
Disputing a charge with your credit card company doesn't change that. The credit card company might side in your favor and reverse the charges, but the original company can still pursue payment with you directly. Their claim can even show up on your credit report. I remember working with a payment processor in Europe that even automated sending a bill to collections if it was charged back by the consumer's credit card company.
playing devils advocate, but taking peoples word prima facie is dangerous. Especially when it deals with financial issues. Pretty sure you can any contempt person could game the system if people found out “students” automatically get refunds for bs charges. I think AWS is different as they have their educate program and distinguish between students and free trial customers. AFAIK gcp doesn’t have an education system for students, so it’s harder to differentiate a legitimate request
What will these system gamers do with computer power? Mining crypto will make them pennies, and running a business on stolen accounts isn’t sustainable.
there are entire dark market businesses built out of finding secrets and deploying a crypto miner as fast as possible and mining as much as possible.
that's just one use case, DDOSing an API/website through seemingly legit requests from the G3's cloud infrastructure is another.
Lots of things you can do with massive amounts of computing power. It doesn't have to be sustainable in the short term, you just keep repeating the process and the value adds up fast
