Google Adsense: Automatic payment declined by Western Union. No reason provided by your financial institution

As usual, I logged in to my Google Adsense account and checked for the monthly payment that is often issued on the 20th. However, I didn’t see the payment by Western Union and they showed me a message saying:

Automatic payment declined: Western Union for $xxxx.xx. No reason provided by your financial institution

I was terrified and thought that there were some issues with my Adsense account or Western Union payment in my country. Fortunately, I did some research and found out that was not my fault at all.

If you have any problem with your Adsense account, I’d recommend you to contact Adsense support and they often send you an answer in a couple of days. Everyone has a different situation and only Adsense staff can look into your account and know what’s going on.

In fact, the problem is not so uncommon and you can find a lot of similar questions on Adsense Help Forum or other webmaster forums. Some posts are dated back to 2014 and it often happens to accounts in Asian countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Cambodia, China, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Taiwan. People in these countries often select Western Union as the payment method since it’s fast and users don’t have to pay ridiculous fees.

There is nothing we can do to resolve the problem since it is actually caused by Google or Western Union. Western Union can’t charge the amount with the payment method provided by Google, so they can’t issue the payment yet. In my case, I just had to wait 1 day; Western Union tried again and they were successful. The payment was released and I received my payment just 1 day late.