[travisglines]

Thanks for responding to this and offering to escalate boulos.

I certainly don't think a student just learning the ins and outs of a cloud provider's services should be able to spend 10k+ without warnings/thresholds that require configuration to exceed. It would be positive for platform adoption to make that process better.

[motherofzappa]

This is hilarious. Student doesn’t understand security in depth model, gets owned. Has a sour taste with said cloud provider. At what level do you accept responsibility for shoddy security practices. If the project was truly defunct then you should have closed the project or removed everyone’s access who isn’t project owner. Hindsight is 20/20.

[duiker101]

Nice victim shaming you got there. The fault of all of this is 100% on whoever stole the credentials and made those calls. OP could maybe have been more careful but that doesn't mean it's all his fault or that we should be shaming in oblivion. And Google can still try to help rather than just take advantage of the situation. Life is easier when we are not dicks to each other, a little empathy can go a long way.

[jstarfish]

> At what level do you accept responsibility for shoddy security practices.

I agree completely-- Google's practices are terrible here. Who in their right mind would render $14,000 worth of services to a customer for which no due diligence was performed? They never stopped to make sure someone whose usage went from zero to the stratosphere was legit or has the ability to pay such a bill?

No other industry would do something so amateur. Lawyers work on retainer. Bartenders will preauthorize your card before letting you clean out the top shelf. Landlords do credit/background checks before letting you assume tenant rights under their roof. Steam will block your credit card until verification if you buy one too many hats. Know your fucking customer!

eFax and stamps.com are the only other businesses I'm aware of who do stuff like this, and it's done by design. You forget to cancel your free trial or account, they'll let the subscription bills accrue into the thousands and then send debt collectors after you to shake you down for a settlement.