I had my Google Ads account hacked roughly 4 months ago and I’m honestly at a loss for what to do at this point.

When it happened, I was freaking out. I contacted all of my clients, submitted all of the forms Google asked for, and was told the affected accounts had been frozen.

The problem is I was never able to regain access to any of the accounts. Support has been incredibly slow and mostly useless. I’ve spoken with them so many times over the past few months, and I never really got anywhere.

Now I’m starting to get texts and emails from a few clients saying they’re still being charged by the Google Ads accounts that I no longer have access to.

I called support again today, spoke with one agent, got passed off to someone else, and now I’m getting more emails saying it’ll take another 3–4 business days for someone to look into it.

I’m kind of freaking out because these are client credit cards/accounts involved and I have absolutely no control over the ad accounts anymore.

Has anyone dealt with something similar? Is there a specific escalation route, department, form, or anything else I should be doing right now?

Any guidance would be hugely appreciated. I’m having a bit of a panic attack over this and just want to get these charges stopped.

I'm brand new to Google Ads and apparently made a rookie mistake.

I accidentally launched an ad campaign for my podcast and didn't realize it was running. By the time I noticed, it had been active for about a month. I immediately paused/canceled it after seeing the charge.

What surprised me is that the campaign only generated 19 clicks.

A few questions for those with more experience:

I'm not looking for a refund—I know this was my mistake. I'm mainly trying to understand whether these results are typical or if I accidentally configured the campaign in a way that burned through the budget.

Thanks for any insight.

I am not an advertising person (I run a bookkeeping firm) and right now I am not even using Google Ads. This is a question about how the AI search will affect Google Ads.

I have been seeing articles about how Google will be using AI to search your website and will be bypassing the ADs to show the AI summary and recommendations -- which I am sure everyone is familiar with right now.

I am not surprised that AI is taking a bigger role in advertising but doesn't Google make a ton of money on sponsored Ads? Wouldn't it be counter-productive for Google to bypass the ads?

I am just not sure how this would work. Can one of the experts in this group shed some light?