I'm nowhere close to a lawyer and law is always a head-scratcher for me, but I'd hope that if that theory held even the slightest amount of legal water, a letter for your lawyer to their legal team might be enough to nudge them to fix your account and that'd be the end of it.
That's basically how it works. It costs you very little(couple hundred £ at most) to ask a lawyer to craft a letter to send to Google legal team saying they have to resolve the issue for you within 14 days or you will be taking them to court. And if there's one thing that's absolutely certain is that Google's law team's time is way more expensive than whatever lawyer you found to write a letter or two is going to charge you . So yes, they can write back telling you to fuck off. But they will know that if you do file a case against them, they will have to send someone to court - and that's going to cost them a lot more than just fixing the stupid issue.
Because any other approach would be game-theoretic suicide. If it became common knowledge that you could threaten to sue Google to get special treatment, that's exactly what everyone would do in every situation where some kind of special treatment was desired. The special treatment would no longer be special; it would be the normal treatment. And so the typical costs associated with handling developers detected as fraudulent by automated defenses would skyrocket. Somebody would have to pay for that, either the shareholders (lol, not likely), or non-fraudulent developers, in the form of handling fees.
If your theory here was true, why does every small business who gets in this situation get stuck with no recourse when its just a few hundred to fix the problem?
Yes, Google could likely not handle the legal costs if everyone went after them in court. Much like prosecutors in the US, what Google does is go hard on anyone who tries to defend themselves legally. At the point the calculus a small business has to make is if its worth it to try and get a remedy in court when Google will make sure to push back as hard as possible and likely destroy your business.
OK. Under this definition of "going hard," literally all companies will "go hard" to defend themselves against incorrect small claims suits. The alternative is to always pay anyone who sues you for $100, since the effort of defending any individual suit in that amount will always be greater than the amount of the potential judgment. Of course, you can't do that, because then more people will start suing you for $100, seeing as you're just giving away money for the asking.
Personally I think that a definition of "going hard" that encompasses the behavior of all actors in a space is absurd. But you're free to interpret those words how you wish.
