1700 $ deduced from my revenue for "fraud" !!!

[Catfish]

Looks like youve gone through the same thing.
First they change my CPA in hindsight after I funded players, then they set up a player quality regulation, of course without giving any advance notice.
I mean it's not the fact that they adapt their policy, I can perfectly understand that. But they should give the affiliate advance notice. After all, I'd like to know that when I bring a player in on CPA basis I will get exactly what was promised.
My problem now is that I have decided to stop funding 50$ and bring the players in under CPA. Instead I work on an MGR basis exclusively, because I wanted a fair long term deal with them, with quality players. And then they come up with this...
Matter of fact, I have sent them several mails offering to provide full ID infos on the funded players, asking them to make sure there was no fraud. I was told not to worry, they have the fraud problem under control.
Now for their negligence in the past, they accuse me of defrauding them.

I wish I had kept going on with the CPA, then they would have to sue me for the 1700 and I would just pull out. Anyway, I have told them that I will stop marketing them. The didn't care. So, first thing I'll do is to take the PartyPoker banner from my website and set up some new affiliate accounts...

[PPP]

Originally Posted by PartyForFree

As such, we were never in violation of any aspect of the affiliate agreement.

Of course you were. You may not like it, but there is no point deluding yourself. EVERY affiliate of any size is bound to have had at least one player sign up that was double dipping, either consciously or innocently.

Even if you didn't solicit players to do a fraud action, if they did, you don't deserve payment. The $50 free business model is not a good one for either an affiliate or the cardroom for this very reason.

Party should have been better detecting fraud but that really is irrelevant since sometimes it could be many months before a pattern of IP addresses could show abuse.

[Catfish]

Here's the original text of the mail sent to me :
"
It has come to our attention that you are in breach of your Affiliate Agreement by virtue of encouraging Players who have previously opened a Player Account to open new Player Accounts using the Link provided on the Affiliate Website. This is in direct breach of Section 3.7 of the Affiliate Agreement which states:

“3.7 Commercial Use Only. This marketing opportunity is for commercial use only. You shall not … attempt to artificially increase the Affiliate Accruals payable to you or to defraud us. Violation of this provision shall be deemed to be Fraud Traffic”. "

Now this is exactly what I have not done. And I am pissed off being falsely accused. Why would they need a pattern of IP to determine a fraudulent account ? That would not prove anything, it could be just two people sharing the same IP. The information was there all the time, they just didn't check it. They haven't even noticed when a player has created two accounts with the same name and adress ! If there is another clause in the terms and conditions that justifies their holding back, I'd like to know about it. I couldn't find it.

[PartyForFree]

Originally Posted by PPP

Even if you didn't solicit players to do a fraud action, if they did, you don't deserve payment.

There's a difference between deserving payment, and commiting fraud.

I think it's absolutely ridiculous for Party to be charging these costs back to affiliates, when they did absolutely nothing to prevent it in the first place.

If Party was to provide me with the tools I would have needed to weed out the players who were creating secondary accounts, I would have happily used them. With no system in place to prevent it, how am I to be held responsioble for it?

We went to great lengths to build security and fraud prevention software, but the one thing we would never be able to do is determine if someone already had an account. I tried to work with the Party Poker security team to come up with something, but we weren't able to due to privacy concerns.

The fact that Party is accepting none of the responsibility of this is retarded. Plain and simple.

Oh, and the no deposit promotion, properly run, can and does work for both the affiliate and the card room.

[PPP]

Originally Posted by PartyForFree

There's a difference between deserving payment, and commiting fraud.

Once again, the primary issue is PLAYER fraud. You do agree that if a player signed up twice that you should not get paid for that, right?

Originally Posted by PartyForFree

I think it's absolutely ridiculous for Party to be charging these costs back to affiliates, when they did absolutely nothing to prevent it in the first place.

What difference does that make? So they gave some affiliates interest free loans. The only problem is this effects people with your business model, where you give free money to players who are later ruled not legitimate. While I understand that in your case it is unfortunate they didn't block players at signup, you are just as responsible as them. The business model was extremely risky, and I have to believe you knew full well that at least SOME of these players now be tracked to you were double-dipping. If you are honest to yourself about it, I'd imagine you will realize that you assumed all along that the majority of your players were double dippers (and some were triple, quadruple and more dippers).

Originally Posted by PartyForFree

If Party was to provide me with the tools I would have needed to weed out the players who were creating secondary accounts, I would have happily used them. With no system in place to prevent it, how am I to be held responsioble for it?

That's simple, you did what you did. It seems obvious that as of today you would not do this business model again under the same circumstances. We are ALL held responsible for our marketing and the quality of players we send. In your case, with no system in place, the only logical step for you is to not do business with them. That is the choice you should have taken previously (if you wanted no risk), given what the terms and conditions said.

Originally Posted by PartyForFree

We went to great lengths to build security and fraud prevention software, but the one thing we would never be able to do is determine if someone already had an account. I tried to work with the Party Poker security team to come up with something, but we weren't able to due to privacy concerns.

But you chose to go forward anyway, despite what the terms and conditions said, and depite obviously knowing at least some of your players were violating them.

Originally Posted by PartyForFree

The fact that Party is accepting none of the responsibility of this is retarded. Plain and simple.

If they return funds, even just confiscated funds to the proper affiliate, they stand to have lost many millins of dollars due to their inadequate security/tracking. They have finally taken responsibility, even if perhaps only because of how many millions it has cost them.

Originally Posted by PartyForFree

Oh, and the no deposit promotion, properly run, can and does work for both the affiliate and the card room.

Could be in theory, but in reality the fraud level is going to be so much higher that it likely will never be meaningly profitable, and will always lead to hard feelings and mistrust between the affiliate and the cardroom.

[PartyForFree]

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.

[Jeremy]

PartyForFree, I will not disagree that the Free $ promotions can sometimes be profitable for both the cardrooms as well as the affiliate, but basically you're saying "fuck the other affiliates, pay me my money". You can't say with an honest conscience that you gave two shits if your players signing up were registered to other affiliates or not. If I signed up for your free 50 deal and said, "I already have a Party account but will sign up under my wife's name", what would you say?..........Now think about that before you answer. It's ethics, and most affiliates are in this for the $$ and not to make friends.

Obviously everyone knows how I feel about incentive marketing. Some portals have found ways to make it +EV for everyone, but 95% never send the value or rake compared to what they are paid in CPA, this is a fact.

And I believe every single affiliate manager on this board, or in the industry for that matter will support me on the point of incentive marketing. <-------Bold statement, but 100% true.

PPP was spot on here with his rebuttal to your post. So if I had a player in 2006 that was raking me $200 a month and then went busto, and later found your site offering a free bankroll...........should he automatically just be yours because he signed up a new account? Seriously, this is what happened both with the all the free $50's and on a completely different scale, with rakeback.

It is the poker rooms job to offer bonuses and incentives, not the affiliates. This is why even with such a terrible affiliate program in the past, PokerStars still manged to become the largest room on the internet and still have EVERY top portal promoting them through a simple CPA affiliate program.

Back to party though, If Party doesn't credit the original affiliate, then I agree, this is a bad deal. But if they do, this will be the BEST thing they have ever done in the poker affiliate industry. If I had a dollar for every player I have lost in the last 4 years to rakeback and incentive marketers like yourself on Party, I wouldn't even have to work anymore.

Can't wait to here more thoughts on this now that it's in the main discussion area.

[Beanie]

Originally Posted by PPP

If they do credit the original affiliate, then there obviously is no negligence, only some affiliates getting short term loans from other affiliates, which is unfortunate but not that big a deal.

If original affiliates do get the money, this policy is the single greatest thing to happen to poker affiliates ever.

I have learned that much of what you say is pretty dead on. Regarding this issue I think you are way off. This is horrible for affiliates, all affiliates because it is setting a precedent for the way Party Poker treats ALL affiliates. The OP is right, Party needed to check its players better, if they knew for fact people were defrauding them they should have shut down their accounts.

I said it before, they WILL get sued over this. What it comes down to is very simple.

Judge: Welcome to my court
Party: At issue is that players made duplicate accounts and we charged them back for the amount they were defrauding us.
Judge: How long do you think this has been going on
Party: Years, in fact some of our skins or partner sites were abusing this for a while
Judge: Who owns those
Party: We do
Judge: So let me get this straight, you own every player that is playing on your site
Party: Yes we do. But we do not allow duplicate accounts as stated in our terms and conditions
Judge: I would assume that there is no way to check for dupicate accounts when the players sign up.
Party: Well you have us on that one judgy. The technology is certainly there, we have just ignored it for years.
Judge: So you must have caught these affiliates red handed?
Party: Not really, we just finally put in the technology and was amazed at the abuse.
Judge: Who abused you
Party: Clearly the customers did, they did anything and everything to get extra value.
Judge: So why are you charging back affiliates and how long, a month maybe?
Party: oh no, we charged them back since 2006
Judge: you have to be ****** kidding me. 2006!
Party: It was a really egregious violation.
Judge: 2006! SEEMS THE CUSTOMERS WERE THE ONE DEFRAUDING YOU.
Party: Your right but we can't charge them and we have these other guys by the balls
Judge: Not really. I am ruling against you for double, since I don't think you are acting responsibly as a PUBLIC company.

[Beanie]

what Jeremy and PPP is missing in this scenario is that one month may have been fine. 2 months, ok, maybe an affiliate can swallow that. People got tabbed for years and it is impossible that Party could not see that their policy caused much of this problem.

This is the same thing that happened when PokerListings black listed a bunch of online sites. Everyone was cheering "Ding Dong the witch is dead" when in fact what PokerListings did was say, "we aren't going to take this lying down".

That was good for ALL affiliates and when Party Poker gets sued and loses so will this. A public company will not be able to behave in this manner. I know there is at least one class action suit gaming steam and I imagine this isn't the last you will hear of any of this.

edit: Responding to Jeremy's point about duplicate accounts. The technology exists to detect these. I know some people would abuse it but those people are the customers. I agree with you that if you are allowed to give the customer an incentive then they will go to any lengths to get it. But that isn't the affiliates fault. One of my business acquaintances got stung bad by this. But Party knew all along his traffic was crap, yet they took it to inflate numbers to shareholders. Which is exactly what this will do too.

At some point people need to realize that we are all in the same boat, there is no us against them in terms of affiliates vs. affiliates. Most bad policies, especially this one, should not be supported by affiliates, all affiliates. Its an irresponsible position by Party. When are you guys next?

[Jeremy]

For the record Beanie, I know every player you bring is +EV to the card rooms, likewise I truly believe you are one of the guys that does have ethics and would not poach another affiliates players.

It's the 500 small guys looking to all bring in 10 players a month on CPA that are the problem to us non incentive/rakeback affiliates.

I understand what you are saying about how long it has been going on and Party not doing anything. But that is like saying Amnesty for immigrants is OK now too. Just because it has been going on for years doesn't make it right. So should Party just say, let's side on the free $50 guys that poached these players for years and essentially just fuck over the legitimate affiliates that brought these players in initially. That's not right either.

Fundamentally someone is going to lose and someone is going to win here. Why should the joker that poached hundreds of players from legitimate MGR affiliates for years be the winner?

In closing though, I think we still need to see if Party is going to credit the old affiliates. If not, this whole discussion is pointless.