Fraudulent Google Play Transactions

[literallyJoel]

My phone was stolen on Saturday March 5th, and over the next 10 minutes or so they racked up £239.51 of charges over 19 Google Play transactions. They were not made on my own Google account. I went into an EE store to get a replacement SIM on the Monday and told them that my phone had been stolen. I did not discover the charges until today when my bank notified me of the upcoming direct debit. 

I have tried contacting Google Support and they directed me to a form to report these transactions, but they require a Correlation ID. I cannot find any information on this and all the support agent would tell me is "Your carrier will provide this". Any help either getting the Correlation ID or disputing these charges with EE would be much appreciated. 

[Katie_B]

Hello @Soren. 

Thanks for coming back to the community and providing us with an update. 

I am sorry to hear this was not an outcome you wished for. 

If you have any questions about this I would recommend getting in touch with Google. 

Katie

[a_vasudeva]

My experience with the identical problem was the same, bounced between EE and Google with neither party understanding the issues. In the end I gave up but ensured that no further charges could be put through the EE account. There is a third party portal that you need to sign into to block this happening, again most EE reps that I spoke to had no real clue how this works. Can't remember the name at the moment. 

[Soren]

There's no visible way to contact google. 

[literallyJoel]

The portal you can block this from happening at is:

customer.boku.com/login

[literallyJoel]

They did that to me originally also. If you haven't already, file a complaint on this specific form:

https://support.google.com/googlepay/contact/complaint

In your complain say that if they don't get it resolved you'll be contacting the financial ombudsmen (and if they don't resolve it then contact the financial ombudsmen. There's info about that on the form I linked). When I threatened them with the financial ombudsmen it got escalated and sorted fairly quickly.

[Soren]

This is really helpful, thanks @literallyJoel . If I get a result I'll post an update.

[Jacko1805]

This has happened to us today, only noticed as I was checking my bank account, altogether they have taken £720 through my ee account, I went on Boku and screenshot all the pages of successful and failed attempts to buy tik tok coin through Google play, we have reported this to EE, Google and the police!

[Lychee]

I had the same problem, but I was lucky in that only £259 was charged to me instead of over £700 - with the amount of failed transactions though it could have easily been as much. I've also reported it to EE and the guide (rep? Not sure of the correct term) is trying to escalate it as Google rejected my claim. I've also found a Google callback/chat/email form that I'm going to use to try to get somewhere to, we'll see if that works.

Did reporting it to the police help at all? I've only reported the theft of my phone to them so I could get a CR number, but I'm wondering if I should report the fraud as well.

@literallyJoel I didn't see any info about the ombudsman on the link you gave, where can I find the contact info for them?

[Jacko1805]

Police action for fraud squad got back to us but were proper shocked as they hadn't heard of this before, to be honest I think Google and the phone companies have a responsibility and duty of care to their customers, to be honest once my contract with EE finishes I will be leaving them and Google should be ashamed.......they won't do nothing as it's money in the bank for them, I've sent my story to alot of TV shows, if more ppl do this hopefully it will get in the public domain and get sorted

[literallyJoel]

Hiya,

I didn't report it to the police when it happend to me so I can't help much there, unfortunately.

As for the Ombudsman, you can find more info here:

https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/

It'd been a little while since it happened to me so I don't fully recall all the details, but if I'm remembering correctly, I think you have to have attempted to resolve the issue with Google via this form specifically:

https://support.google.com/googlepay/contact/complaint

Only once you've attempted to resolve the issue via this form will the Ombudsman help.