CLRB Hanson LLC et al. v. Google Class Action Settlement

Yesterday I received an interesting piece of email, it was an email that looked a whole lot like spam that evaded my filter. The emailed contained a court order supposedly issued yesterday in US District Court, North California, San Jose division (jurisdiction where Google is headquartered). It says Google was sued through class action lawsuit as they overcharged AdWords advertisers past their allotted budget. I ran an AdWords campaign for several months before suspending it because I saw Google was indeed exceeding my budget regularly. Here's part of the header:

Of course I'm skeptical and assume its a piece of spam mail that is very clever, but this was sent directly to private email. I did a quick google and one site listed it as spam, another forum was discussing it as legit. There's a line in it saying Google will automatically credit overcharged accounts or advertisers can opt for cash (red flag: by giving personal info). This got through the gmail spam filter, which is why I glanced at it in the first place. Anyone else get something like this?

Full text on spam email graveyard: Spam Email Graveyard: CLRB Hanson LLC et al. v. Google Class Action Settlement

 

There is a legitimate class action settlement. Google was supposed to start sending out email notices to all Adwords customers starting yesterday. I don't know if that it the law firm that was appointed to hand out settlements though.

What AdWords Customers Need To Know About $20 Million Settlement

Probably won't be the last settlement. I know of at least three other lawsuits that are pending against Google and have heard rumors of two FTC investigations. One for anti-trust and another for invading the personal privacy of their users.

 

Interesting, I figure that I would just keep an eye on my email/AdWords account for any kind of official notification regarding the settlement. It would be nice to get a small amount of money back for the overcharges. Although I did notice on another discussion site that there was note of an updated Google Terms of Use that legally absolves them of any charges over the customer-set limit.