Stefan Andres
Some users of the Google Pixel forum on Reddit have reported that Google has been sending them random amounts of money for no reason. The amounts arrived along with a notification – users had received the money for “Dogfooding the Google Pay Remittance Experience”. Some testimonials are small amounts, others have seen their account balance increase by over $1,000 (€909).
“Dogfooding” means that a company’s employees test a new feature or service before the feature moves into public testing. Normally, Google would conduct these tests with employees. Since this case involved new features of Google Pay, Google would simply transfer the employees concerned a part of their salary as part of the test.
Apparently something went wrong this time though, and Google accidentally sent money to random users for “testing” Google Pay features instead of paying their own employees who actually tested them. As a result, Google informed the affected users that they would try to reverse the payment. If that is not possible, the money would belong to the respective users. Hands up – who’s one of the lucky Pixel phone users who just got $1,000 from Google?
