Especially if Google wrongfully kept the money from many customers. I would think some government run institutions would get going. Something like the "public prosecutor's office" or so.
At a medium scale (in # of cases), you might find a law firm willing to take on a lot of cases, in exchange for a big cut. You can also choose to pursue your own situation individually.
At a small scale (just your case let's say, and a small'ish sum of money), you're going to mostly be limited to small claim's court, which can work perfectly well sometimes:
http://consumerist.com/2008/01/21/suing-big-companies-in-sma...
Most likely what Google is doing, is dancing in the gray area. For example, is it criminal when PayPal hits you with a chargeback because a customer lies about x y or z? Given their size there's no question they do that a lot. Google would argue their business choices, like shutting down someone's wallet account (with money in it), falls into a similar category of business discretion - rather than being criminal.
This is why almost all of what the SEC does is civil enforcement, fines, etc. In business there are almost always cases of financial loss due to ignorance, incompetence, discretion, risk taking and so on - most of that is not properly going to be criminal, but rather civil.
Were Google doing something inappropriate in an area involving business discretion, the government may decide it's not ok, but not criminal (eg lacking the intention to defraud). In that case, they'll typically try to put a stop to the behavior, and use fines to do so. At times it can be incredibly difficult to show a company is intending to defraud its customers, the Feds would need a hard trail of evidence (emails, communication, etc. showing Google was trying to defraud customers).
BBB doesn't benefit by alienating businesses or making it "difficult" to resolve complaints, and they have no obligation to actually help the consumer. There are a lot of shady companies with really good BBB ratings.
BBB is on its way out I think, superseded by crowdsourced review sites. People don't check BBB ratings very often anymore.
That's what the civil justice system is for.
> Especially if Google wrongfully kept the money from many customers. I would think some government run institutions would get going.
There's some government institutions (other than the courts themselves) that might have authority to initiate action in certain cases, but in general "not paying out funds the way I think is required based on the contract I have with you" is the kind of thing handled through private actions in the civil justice system.
> Something like the "public prosecutor's office" or so.
While its possible that anything wrong Google might have done might rise to the level of a criminal, rather than civil, wrong, none of the descriptions I've seen point to anything that (even if the descriptions are presumed to be completely correct) seems obviously criminal.
