Posting this as a public record after five rounds of private correspondence produced no decision. I run a small roadside-assistance app (Priority Help Car) in Spain — a paying Google Cloud customer averaging ~€5/month for the prior six months.
This is nearly identical to @Johnny_Collins’ case (thread 166921): same AI Studio auto-key vector, almost the same amount, same silence.
1. What happened
- On 20-May-2026, between ~03:27 and 04:30 CET, ~€6,360 was billed against Generative Language API in about one hour — on a project,
gen-lang-client-03743069.., that Google AI Studio auto-created and silently linked to my billing account. I never knowingly opened it. It had zero Gemini usage before this. - Total May invoice: €6,375.51. All but ~€14 of legitimate usage is unauthorized.
2. What is verifiable on Google’s own side (none of this depends on my word)
- Cost Anomaly record: a single entry, 20-May — expected cost €0.76, actual €6,359, a 7,000×+ deviation, 99.99% attributed to Generative Language API. Google’s own detector fired. Nothing acted on it.
- 37 declined charges to the same card in under an hour (escalating €100 → €5,500) — a textbook fraud signal, logged by Google’s own billing — with no platform-side stop. The account was auto-suspended only at the end of that window.
- Tier status: the project was promoted to a tier allowing five-figure spend with $0 of prior payments, while Google’s published policy requires $1,000 paid + 30 days for Tier 3. The threshold was never met.
- IAM: two principals, both mine. No service-account compromise, no third-party grants.
3. What I have tried
- R1 (21-May) — initial appeal; project access restored 24-May, debt left standing.
- R2 (25-May) — full appeal, Billing Support Case #71625762, six monthly statements attached.
- R3 (25-May) — reply to Trust & Safety (ticket T3S2JCHZSTU5IDUDXLH7DJLXRE).
- R4 (26-May) — answered all seven technical questions Support asked.
- R5 (1-Jun) — narrowed to a single request.
Ten days of silence since R5, on both channels.
4. What I am asking for
I’m not asking for anything outside the pattern Google has already established for this category of incident — goodwill cancellations are publicly documented for technically equivalent cases (Fonseka, Danan). I’m asking only for consistency:
- A named reviewer and a committed decision date for Case #71625762.
- A written billing standstill while the review is open.
- Full cancellation of the unauthorized Gemini charges — not a credit, not a partial.
If anyone — @Johnny_Collins especially — reached a named reviewer or got a standstill in writing, I’d value knowing which path worked.