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Reaching out to the Tessitura Community to see if any other organizations have experienced this issue with Google Grants.
We recently applied for a Google Grant and were told by Google that somebody in our organization had already applied and been accepted: we would have to get administrative access from the person with that email address. We thought it was from a long time ago, done by employees that are no longer here. When we were finally able to get Google to grant us administrative access, we tried to connect the Google Grants to Google Adwords, and were denied again because our account had been suspended due to violation of Terms of Agreement. When we checked the account we found the email under which the account had been created, and it was not ours.
It appears that somebody with a Google Gmail address may have used our non-profit Tax ID to create a Google Grant account in our name (hence why we could not locate the email address) and then used Grants to send spam to a video game YouTube channel. The scam lasted 2 days before Google shut it down. When we legitimately attempted to use our Google Grants, we were denied, presumably because they thought we were a black-hat spammer. When we applied for account reinstatement, we were denied twice.
We cannot get a live person from Grants to talk to us on the phone. We only get back form letter rejections through their web application, though we've explained in our reinstatement that it was not us, and perhaps fraud. We've been able to talk to somebody in Adwords on the phone, but that person does not have authority to reinstate nor speak for the Grants department that does.
We found this thread, which may indicate this is a growing problem.
https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Google-Ad-Grants/Ad-Grants-Fraud/td-p/466892
We were wondering if any Tessitura organizations have experienced this issue and, if so, how (or if) they were able to resolve it.
Thanks, Drew
Firstly, WOW. So sorry to hear this happened to you. When I have needed to get in touch with Google in the past, I asked my web developer to do it for me and paid for their time. Our web developer at the time was a Google Gold Partner (or something like that), so they had a Google rep that they could talk to. We also use an advertising agency that is a Google Partner or something similar and I'm sure if we needed them to, they could reach someone at Google. So my advice is to find someone who is a Google partner and see if they will (for a fee of course) contact Google on your behalf. Good luck. Maybe someone else knows a better way ...