Some Google Pay Users Offered Tiny Bribes to Check Transaction Data

Google is taking an old-fashioned approach to troubleshooting possible accuracy issues with Google Pay: It’s throwing money at the problem. But not much: 25 cents a pop. 

The issue here appears to be that Google’s NFC payments app sometimes ignores the data that comes in from the tap-to-pay transaction(Opens in a new window) and instead tags the purchase with the name of a nearby merchant. I’ve seen this myself; in March it identified an NFC transaction with a vendor at an Arlington, Virginia, farmers’ market as a purchase at a movie theater maybe 100 feet away(Opens in a new window).

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Sometime this summer, Google Pay began offering some users, myself among them, a 25-cent reward for spot-checking its records. 

“Confirm the correct business name and address for the transaction below,” this invitation read when it appeared on my phone last week. “You’ll earn a reward.”

Below, it showed the name of the merchant as recorded by Google Pay, a map of its location, and the sum of the purchase, followed by “Yes, the information is correct” and “No, the information is incorrect” dialogs. 

In that case–a ticket purchase at the train station in Copenhagen, where I spoke at a conference last week–Google Pay had it right. I claimed the 25 cents, which on top of two prior rewards I’d claimed (Google Pay was accurate both times) brought me up to 75 cents in fact-checking income.

(Credit: Rob Pegoraro)

I seem to have almost no company in this effort. No one has mentioned it in Reddit’s 4,800-member r/googlepay subreddit so far, to judge from the results of a query for “reward.”(Opens in a new window)

In an email, Google spokeswoman Chaiti Sen called this “a very limited test we are running to verify merchants and make sure that they are being accurately tagged.” She did not elaborate on how Google has picked users or what triggers this fact-checking query. 

This isn’t the only time Google has resorted to paying people to engage with the latest version of its app, which has seen multiple rebrandings over the past decade and then saw Google rip and replace one version of the app that was linked to a user’s Google account with another that relied on the user’s mobile number for authentication(Opens in a new window). Since that reboot of this beleaguered franchise, Google has offered a variety of cash-back deals for such tasks as referring friends to the app and making payments to new merchants. 

But Samsung, by far the most popular manufacturer of Android smartphones, already offers its own tap-to-pay app and has recently added such new features as support for digital keys for its SmartThings home locks and even some BMW, Hyundai, and Genesis cars. 

Meanwhile, no such confusion exists on iPhones, where Apple Pay has stayed Apple Pay since its 2014 launch and long ago became a snappier synonym(Opens in a new window) for “NFC mobile payments.”