Your beloved Moniker and their domain parking branch TrafficClub have hit an unprecedented new low in their history of poor customer service, hare-brained programming and over-the-top marketing.
Some two years ago I opened an account with Moniker, who then marketed themselves as the premier registrar. Being used to Fabulous.com's excellence I wasn't overwhelmed by the experience - the site was full of amateurish programming errors (example: whois/registrant email lookup done by Moniker when initiating an inbound transfer would return '
[email protected]' after a certain time of the day, this generally happens when an IP does > 100 netsol queries per 24 hours, to prevent spamming, but naturally isn't supposed to happen in such cases as the abovementioned). Support replies were usually slow (>24 hours for an answer) and sometimes absent, such as in the case when I alerted Moniker about errors like the abovementioned. But overall, it was "ok".
In the past few months, however, customer service quality has further deteriorated and come to a complete halt. Emails simply aren't being answered anymore, nor by the general support address, nor by my account/sales rep, nor by general sales.
I'm sure it wasn't a problem with my email address, as I wasn't the only one with this problem, and my premium domain submissions for the live auction always somehow found their way to the people in charge. For example, a domain I submitted months ago for the Internext Live Auction, for which I signed a contract, and about which I never got any confirmation despite my repeated attempts, suddenly ended up on the 'top list' of feb 20th TRAFFIC West Live Auction.
Now I've been parking some of my domains at TrafficClub for over half a year. TrafficClub uses a Skenzo feed, and due to their payment times TrafficClub "pays" on a net-45 basis. This is clearly mentioned in the TOS.
Moniker/TrafficClub were taken over by Oversee.net (DomainSponsor etc) in January. A few days later, without any form of communication or authorisation, domains were switched from a Skenzo to a DomainSponsor feed. While Monte Cahn and other Moniker reps were busy telling lies about Moniker's stability and how this takeover would increase everything under the sun for everyone, loads of people (including me) experienced heavy earnings drops and had to manually reset the feed to Skenzo.
A net-45 payment basis means November '07 payments should have been sent out and received January 15th. However, I just got my payment a few days ago. Moreover, it's
±25% short of what it should be. Moniker haven't cared to send out any notification of late payment whatsoever, do not reply to inquiries and have not given any explanation why they're shaving. To get this straight: my statistics are still showing the "correct amount".
I'm not the only one affected by this. Judging from forums like NP and DNF it seems like all domainers have been hit (some have not yet received payment, everyone's payment was short 25-50% of what it should be), and if that is the case this fraud extends to hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
What strikes me is the utter arrogance of this company. How dare they not reply to support requests, how dare they defraud their loyal affiliates without any sort of communication while their marketing machine rolls on and while they continue to flaunt worthless .mobi domains in their "premium" live auctions?
I'm sure a few on this board have been hit as well. I hope the situation will change soon, or that legal action is taken by the americans amongst us (I'll gladly donate!)
Cliffnotes for the lazy readers:
- Moniker/TrafficClub customer service standards are now less impressive than Juicy's "Glockenspiel"
- TrafficClub, a domain parking service by Moniker, delay payments for over a month without notification and defraud loyal affiliates by simply shaving 25-50% off revenues paid without any form of communication and still fail to reply to questions about this.