Banned Twice by Google Play: How I Registered a Company and Got a DUNS Number in 7 Days

I had a Google Play Console individual account. I did nothing to it. No policy stunts, no spam, no cloned apps. One day it was terminated for "high risk behavior" — and the email helpfully added that if I opened a new individual account, that one would be banned too.

I was broke at the time. That account was the plan.

This post is the whole road out of that hole: why individual accounts were a dead end, why I registered a single-member company in Pakistan instead of a US LLC, how I got a DUNS number in about a week instead of a month, and the bank-account trap at the end that nearly took the new account down thirty days after I finally got it approved.

If you are staring at a termination email right now, the short version is: you need an organization account, an organization account needs a registered company, and a company needs a DUNS number. Everything below is how I got all three with almost no money.

Google Terminated My Account and Refused to Say Why

I opened a support ticket and asked one question: what exactly did I do?

The reply took a long time to arrive. When it did, it said — and I am paraphrasing only slightly — that it is not possible for them to share the specific reason.

We are unable to provide the exact reason for the termination.

Think about what that means in practice. You are accused, convicted, and sentenced by an automated system, and the appeal process will not tell you the charge. You cannot fix a problem nobody will name. There is no version of "improve your behavior" that works when the behavior is a secret.

I did not stop there. I opened a second individual account, registered in another country, and tried again.

Banned again.

At that point the message was clear, and it was not a message about me — it was a message about the account type. Google had decided something about individual developer accounts in my situation, and no amount of new individual accounts was going to change it. So I stopped fighting the ban and went looking for a different door.

Why an Organization Account Was the Only Way Out

Here is what I found: an organization account is treated as a different class of applicant. It is tied to a legally registered business with a verifiable identity, not to a person with an email address. Google's own required information to create a Play Console developer account spells out the difference — an organization account has to supply a legal business name, a business address, and a DUNS number that Google independently verifies against Dun & Bradstreet's records.

That verification requirement is the whole reason it works. A bot can flag an individual sign-up on a hunch. It has a much harder time flagging a company that exists in an international business registry.

So the path became:

1. Register an actual company.
2. Get a DUNS number for that company.
3. Open a Play Console organization account with both.

Three steps. Each one has a cheap way and an expensive way, and I want to save you the time I spent finding the cheap ones.

Choosing the Company Type: Why SMC (Pvt) Ltd

My first instinct was a US LLC, because that is what every indie hacker on the internet tells you to do. I priced it out. Registered agent, filing fees, annual franchise tax, an EIN, a business bank account that wants a US presence — it needed more money than I had at that moment. Honestly, more than I have comfortably spare even now.

So I registered in Pakistan, where I actually live. If you are outside the US, do the same thing: register where you are, not where Twitter tells you to. Google does not care which country's registry your company sits in. It cares that the registry is real.

Pakistan gives you three realistic options, and picking the right one matters:

• Sole proprietorship — cheapest, fastest, and useless here. It is not a separate legal entity, so it has no certificate of incorporation and no clean path to a DUNS number as a company. Skip it.
• Private Limited (Pvt Ltd) — a proper company, but it requires at least two members. That means finding a second person, putting their name on your company, and giving them a shareholding. I am solo. I did not want anyone else attached to my business for the rest of its life because of a Google policy.
• Single Member Company — SMC (Pvt) Ltd — a private limited company with exactly one member. You. Full separate legal entity, real certificate of incorporation, no co-founder required.

SMC (Pvt) Ltd was the obvious answer and it is the only one I will speak about from experience, because it is the only one I registered. If you are a solo developer in Pakistan facing this same wall, this is the structure you want.

Registering the SMC With SECP

The whole thing runs online through the SECP eServices portal. You do not need a lawyer or a consultant, and anyone charging you a large fee to do this is charging you for form-filling. SECP's own company registration overview covers the official process.

The sequence, short version:

1. Create an eServices account. You will need your CNIC and a mobile number registered in your name. Sign-up issues an e-signature you use on every filing afterwards.
2. Reserve the company name. Submit three or four options in priority order, because good names get rejected for being too close to something already on the register. Add "(SMC-Private) Limited" to the end — the suffix is mandatory for this structure. This is a separate paid step and it comes back in a day or two.
3. File the incorporation application. Company type SMC (Pvt) Ltd, your details as the single member and director, registered office address, share capital, and your chosen business activity. Pick your activity codes carefully — software development and IT services — because this text ends up describing your company everywhere afterwards, including on your DUNS record.
4. Pay the fee and wait. Approval came back quickly, and the important artifact lands in your eServices dashboard: the Certificate of Incorporation. Download it as a PDF and keep it somewhere you can find in ten seconds. You will need it in the next section.

All in, I spent about PKR 13,000 to register the SMC (Pvt) Ltd. Fees move around depending on your authorized share capital and whether you file online, so treat that as the order of magnitude rather than a quote. It is a fraction of what a US LLC would have cost me, and for the purpose of satisfying Google it does exactly the same job.

The DUNS Shortcut: Apple's Form, Not D&B's

This is the part I am most glad I figured out, and it is the reason this post exists.

A DUNS number is a nine-digit business identifier issued by Dun & Bradstreet. Both Apple and Google use it to confirm an organization is real. You can request one directly from D&B's official form — for free — and in my region the realistic wait was around 30 days.

Apple has its own DUNS lookup and request form for developers enrolling as an organization. Same registry, same number, dramatically faster turnaround.

Here is exactly what I did:

1. Created a brand new Apple ID. My existing Apple ID already had an individual Apple Developer Program membership running, and you cannot convert one of those into an organization enrollment. If you have no Apple Developer account yet, your existing Apple ID is fine — use it.
2. Started Apple Developer Program enrollment and chose Organization as the entity type.
3. Apple asked for a DUNS number. I did not have one, so I followed their link to the lookup form.
4. Filled in the company details and uploaded the Certificate of Incorporation from the SECP portal. Legal name, registered address, and phone number all have to match the certificate character for character. This is the single most common reason these applications bounce.
5. Waited about 7 days and got an email containing my DUNS number.

Then I stopped.

I never completed the Apple organization enrollment, because I did not need it — I already had a working individual Apple Developer account for my iOS apps. I only went through Apple's door to get the DUNS number for Google. The number is not Apple's property; it is your company's identifier in D&B's registry, and it works anywhere that asks for one.

That is the trick, and it is completely legitimate: 7 days through Apple instead of ~30 through D&B, for a number you then use on Google Play. Nobody told me this. I want it written down somewhere findable.

Creating the Google Play Organization Account

With a certificate of incorporation and a DUNS number in hand, this stage was almost boring — which, after everything above, was a genuine relief.

Go to Play Console sign-up, choose organization as the account type, and fill in the legal business name, registered address, contact details, and DUNS number. Everything must match your incorporation certificate exactly. Pay the $25 one-time registration fee.

My account was approved within a day.

Same person, same laptop, same country, same apps I intended to publish. The only thing that changed was that a registry somewhere could confirm my company existed. Two individual accounts terminated on suspicion; one organization account approved in twenty-four hours.

I published an app. It went live. It started making money.

The Bank Account Trap Nobody Warns You About

Then the email arrived: add a bank account to receive your payouts.

Obviously I wanted a company bank account in the company's name. So I went looking for one, and hit a wall that still annoys me more than the ban did. Not a single bank I found would open a business account online. Every one of them required physically visiting a branch, in person, with a folder of documents, during banking hours. I had just registered an entire company from my laptop, and the bank wanted me to come stand in a queue.

So I did what my friend Usman Muaz told me was possible: I submitted my personal bank account details on an organization Play Console account.

A few days later: rejected. And the email came with a deadline — fix this within 30 days or the Console account is permanently terminated.

I had just clawed my way back onto the platform and was about to lose it again over a bank form.

I searched for hours. There is almost nothing useful written about this specific failure. So I stopped searching and opened a support ticket, explained the situation plainly, and asked for a manual review.

They approved it. The warning disappeared. The payouts went through.

The problem was never the bank account. The automated verification simply failed to match my personal account against the organization profile, flagged it, and started a countdown — and a human looking at the same documents approved it without hesitation. Google's order processing and payouts documentation covers payment profiles generally but says nothing about this mismatch case.

So, from direct experience: yes, you can receive Google Play payouts into a personal bank account on an organization developer account. If the automated check rejects it, that rejection is not final — open a support ticket and ask for manual review before the 30 days run out. Do not panic, and do not close the account.

The Timeline and What It Actually Cost

Start to finish, from termination to a paid, published app on an organization account:

• Name reservation + SMC (Pvt) Ltd incorporation via SECP — roughly a week end to end, about PKR 13,000
• DUNS number via Apple's developer form — ~7 days, free (versus ~30 days through D&B directly)
• Play Console organization account — approved in ~1 day, $25 one-time
• Bank payout rejection → manual review — a few stressful days, free

The money was never the hard part. The hard part was that no single page on the internet laid out the sequence, so I lost weeks discovering that individual accounts were unfixable, that an organization account needed a company, that the company needed a DUNS number, and that the fastest DUNS route runs through Apple's enrollment form rather than D&B's.

If you are somewhere in that maze right now: register the company where you live, use the SMC structure if you are solo in Pakistan, get your DUNS through Apple, and do not let a bank form scare you into abandoning an account you fought this hard for.

And if Google ever tells you it cannot share the reason — build the company. It is the only argument their system actually listens to.