Originally Posted by pompousjohn

Scrubbing is not about shaving, its about simply not allowing transactions that don't conform to higher standards.

For example, I can choose to accept or not accept transaction where:

1) The customer IP country does not match the Billing Address country (usually fraud but people travel and travelers masturbate)
2) The billing address is not correct, or not exactly correct. (people sometimes move and don't update)
3) CVV code is incorrect
4) Surfers country has a higher rate of fraud than I am comfortable with
5) Surfer already made x attempts to join that were unsuccessful for various reasons
6) Surfers address, email or IP is on a blacklist cause they are known to have charged back in the past
7) Surfer is using a card that is either prepaid or does not generally support rebilling

And a few others. All the above filters are great for preventing fraud but can also stop genuine transactions where the surfer is either unlucky or just not real bright. I have personally been stopped from performing genuine transactions by most of them, usually due to drinking or travelling.

That's what I mean when I say scrub. This cannot easily be done on a per affiliate basis using any system I am aware of, changes would be across the board, and with 3rd parties like Epoch it is pretty unlikely though not impossible that there could be custom scrub levels.

Shaving on the other hand is when you take the surfers money and don't credit the affiliate.

I used Epoch as a biller for awhile and during that time had some fraud issues with certain affiliates, Epoch's method of handling that was to disable the individual affiliates involved and leave the scrub level untouched (as far as I could tell) so I doubt there is any custom scrubbing going on, it's just not Epoch's usual method, based on my experience.