6 Ace Games, a video game development startup for Android, it could disappear due to an unwarranted decision by Google and your lack of response.
The company has a small team of developers who produce next-gen games and publish them on the Play Store. After 3 years of hard work, they managed to produce 10 games and 4 of them are multiplayer.
Two of the multiplayer games have been very popular in the US and Europe, thanks to the company invested all its money in marketing so that our games reach the right audience. Almost all of their games have been rated over 4.5 stars and have been downloaded a million times.
Everything was going well until, in the early hours of September 25th, they received an email from Google Play informing them that your developer account has been terminated for past violations of that account or any other associated account.
Google may cancel your developer account for no reason
All workers were shocked to see the mail. So far, they have never received any suspension in any of their games. When Google contacts them about a policy violation, all issues are satisfactorily fixed.
Original email from Google Play
At first, they thought that decision might be a mistake, so they appealed via a link provided in the email. They responded 2 days later saying that they reviewed and confirmed the association with another banned developer account.
The company responded that something was wrong as it had no other Play Store account. Google repeated the same auto-reply, and the same thing happened when they directed it to the official Google Play Dev Twitter account.
Google’s response to the appeal
what could have gone wrong
The company tried to find out why this happened, but Google does not provide any information in the emails and they repeat the same automatic responses.
There are three possible reasons why Google might have thought the company had multiple accounts, some of which were blocked.
Possible reason 1: unscrupulous competitors
A competitor may have used your advertising identifier and publisher code in applications that do not comply with Google’s policy and intentionally violate it to cause such account to be terminated.
These types of malicious practices are supposedly used to ban competing developer accounts.
Any unauthorized competitor / user was able to use the company’s publisher code in their app-ads.txt or place the advertising IDs on apps created to intentionally violate Google policy. Therefore, due to serious violations, Google blocks / terminates your account and this leads to blocking this company’s account as well.
Possible reason 2: virus attack
On September 9, 2021, this startup’s network was infected by a Trojan / RansomWare and, on that same day, the AdMob account was accessed by an unauthorized user in the United States.
On September 11th, someone tried to log into your developer account. Login was blocked by Google and two-factor authentication.
On Sept. 24, during a routine technical check, they discovered that their network was infected, including one of the principal’s PCs saving the developer account password in the browser.
On the same day, they received a notification from Google about a suspicious login using the ‘android 4.4’ device located in the UK with the developer’s account password. The next day, they received a notification that the developer’s account had been terminated due to association with other banned accounts.
Possible reason 3: office relocation
The company recently moved to a new location due to the pandemic. Other developers may have used your old location’s IP address to publish apps inconsistent with the policies in the Play Store.
Is someone on the other side? Or just robots?
The company has returned to Google with every possible reason for the unwarranted blocking. And they got the same automatic response again, deny the feature and confirm association with locked accounts.
Another Google Auto Responder
The company is desperate. You don’t know why Google suddenly thinks they’re associated with multiple banned accounts. And you feel helpless. After trying every possible way to get in touch with someone on Google who can help, they don’t get any response or response from a bot.
Now, the company has published its story in Medium to try to get the attention of some human inside Google who can actually check all the details. If they fail to reverse the situation, the company will be forced to disappear.