On August 14th, I received an email from Google saying that my Google Pay balance of 38 cents was to be forfeited in 9 days unless I took some specific action:

Merriam-Webster defines escheat as “the reversion of property to the crown in England or to the state in the U.S. when there are no legal heirs”

In general, in order to be escheated, property needs to be both unclaimed and the lawful owner is unknown. Neither of these is the case here, as obviously Google knows these are my funds and how to contact me (as well as lots of other data they’ve collected on me and anyone else who has ever used any of their services).

So I clicked on the “contact us” link, which was as unhelpful as ever* – if you or your company aren’t paying Google, you’re a product to be sold, not a customer to be assisted. Inventory doesn’t get to complain.

If I had been able to contact anyone/anything at Google that had even an ounce of common sense, I would have asked for this to be transferred to my Google Play Store account, which gets used several times a month. Instead, Google is presumably going to add my info to a giant spreadsheet, along with everyone else they’re escheating that lives in my state, and send the spreadsheet and a single check to my state.

Just out of sheer orneriness, I’m going to wait for my 38 cents to be processed by my state and then I’m going to request a check be sent to me for the 38 cents. It would be fantastic if enough people did this that someone in one or more states goes “WTF?” and complains to Google that Google is making the state pay to return funds to Google’s customers because Google is too lazy to do so itself. I’d love to see a class action** over this, but that’s being way too optimistic.

At best, someone searching for “google escheat” may come across this page in search results.

* When I ordered a Pixel 3XL phone direct from Google and they reduced the price by $200 before I’d even received my order, their canned response was that I could return it, pay the restocking fee, and re-order it at the new lower price. When pressed, their “official” position was that I should join Reddit, send a direct message explaining the situation to someone named “Ziggy”. Bizarrely, that eventually worked. Ziggy’s email signature read “Ziggy / Platinum Google Product Expert & Mentor / Docs, Fi, and Pixel”. One heck of a way to run a company.

** I’m hopeful that many of the class action suits which don’t return any meaningful funds to the class members still serve as an incentive for the company being sued to stop doing whatever they did that led to the class action suit in the first place. Google seems to hold the opinion that they can pay their way out of their various legal issues with trivial amounts of money (for example, an hour’s worth of profits) and keep on doing what they’ve been doing. Even if the US doesn’t have any taste for a battle with Google, the European Union certainly seems to be spoiling for a fight.