from Hacker News

Tell HN: Google terminated my YouTube account but charges me for YouTube Premium

by ent101 on 4/14/25, 11:58 PM with 4 comments

Few months ago, Google randomly, and without warning, terminated my YoutTube account because "it violates our Spam, deceptive practices and scams policy", even though I had only published one simple, unlisted screen recording of my personal project, shared with friends and family. I appealed the decision and got immediately rejected with no recourse.

I was a YouTube Premium subscriber, and Google is still charging me every month with no way for me to cancel the subscription. None of the links work because, well, my YouTube account is terminated and nobody to talk to.

I've tried anything and everything with no luck. Has anybody experienced something like this? How were you able to stop the subscription?

  • by toomuchtodo on 4/15/25, 12:03 AM

    Chargeback every transaction until it stops? Tell your credit card company what you’ve shared in this post.

    If you have any other data with Google, you will want to use Takeout as soon as possible to have that data in your possession.

    https://takeout.google.com/

  • by BLKNSLVR on 4/15/25, 12:51 AM

    This is not a solution for now, but a solution for 'next time', but can you migrate to using 'virtual credit cards' where you can essentially use a separate credit card number per subscription. In cases like this, you just cancel the credit card number that's been "burned", but you don't have to re-jig all the other subs to use a new number.

    (ie. the advice for this situation is cancel the credit card, knowing that's a giant pain in the arse).