How much of an ASS FUCKING are you willing to put up with from a Program Sponsor???

$222 expect nothing but crying on your part wew

you never had an issue with his traffic before, all of a sudden you skim him out of 10,000$ of sales.

doesnt make sense.

how do you prove they are 'skimming' sales?

I've read your post and your site, and I don't see ANY proof that they shaved your sales.

Where is it?

It depends really. Will they lubricate first?

Sounds like chatter traffic.

I'm not willing to put up with much of anything. If I see something suspicious I'll usually bail. There are always other choices out there and if there isn't then there's always other products to sell. At times I might reluctantly put up with something minor like urls all over the hosted videos but only when it still seems advantageous to use that sponsor. Once a better choice comes along they are gone.

With your situation with AWE you know whether you were sending honest signups or not. So you know whether or not they can be trusted. *If* they really are cheats there's no sense begging cheats for your money. I mean when is the last time a bank robber voluntarily returned the money out of the goodness of their heart? You sent 100 signups over a month or so. Over a couple years then you can easily send thousands of signups. Go do it. Send it to their competitors. You're not some bum begging for money, you're sending leads. Make money without them. Fuck 'em. You don't need them.

Then why mention it in your first post

Anyways, look at the bottom line and expect everybody to be shaving you (leaks, joins, mailings etc etc). If caught shaving joins (as in not reporting sales) ofcourse I would pull all traffic.

Right. Pull all traffic on anyone shaving you in any way if you can. A cheat is a cheat. A scumbag is a scumbag. If they'll steal from you in one way chances are they'll steal from you in another way soon enough too. There are honest programs out there who would love your traffic.

QFT

On the other hand consider that affiliates can be like a bank. Say you make $100,000 profit per month but suddenly that number is down to $90,000. One way to "fix" that might be to skim 10% off your bottom 80% of affiliates. Times get tougher still and you'd be down to $70,000 if you didn't skim. So what can you do? Maybe you can up that skim/shave to 30% then. And so on and so forth until you get to the point where your affiliates finally all leave because you've been stealing too many cookies from the old cookie jar. It's a trap for dishonest sponsors really.

As far as talking believe me I'd love to but it's hard to prove without going way out and taking extreme measures to prove it. Here's one for you but no names (Don't ask. Will neither confirm or deny). I'd bet a testicle they were shaving me around 60% - 80% from the numbers. I sent them some known excellent quality hits for a few days which usually convert PPA no worse than 1:10. Now I watch stats like a hawk when I first sign up with a sponsor so keep this in mind. Can't give away too much without revealing them but these guys have two categories. They pay at the agreed rate for certain HQ traffic but under different terms for the other non-HQ traffic. Well I discovered that the non-HQ traffic (that they did not have to pay PPA on) converted about as I suspected around 1:8 but the HQ traffic from the same sources which they did have to pay per action on surprisingly converted near 1:90. On top of that click counts were low. A few days into it I think someone might have suspected that I was watching close or tracking clicks so suddenly all at once I noticed a bunch of clicks were dumped on one day into my stats (about equal to what was missing the last few days).

It told the story like a book. You'd look at the non-HQ stats and see high volume and the expected ratios but if you looked at the HQ stats (which they would have had to pay under PPA terms) it was totally off. After some days finally the non-HQ stats started to match the HQ stats (for the worse)...right around the time when all the stray hits were suddenly dumped into their stats.

What would it take to prove this? It'd take test signups all sufficiently documented, expert witnesses (to testify that it appears a shave algorithm is in place and to document that there were no known conditions to explain the test signups not registering commission, etc), and perhaps a subpoena to the people who wrote the backend so that they would have to testify under oath and also get the source code. Hardly worth it in my case. I lost maybe $40. I'll just move on. But if you're sending these clowns thousands and thousands of hits a day you MIGHT be losing a lot if they are doing the same to you. Watch out. Think this is rare, really?

..... I see no proof of shaving or skimming of any kind but it sure does sound like you were carding them.

If he was carding them that would be illegal and he's in the US. I wouldn't pay someone anything if they were caught carding.

I think any affiliate who has been some time in the business has been fucked by a sponsor one way or another, when it happened to me I lost $250, removed all of the sponsor links and moved on.

What is staggering here is the amount of money that the OP claims to have lost, yes skimming happens all the time in this business, nothing new here, but there are still some honest sponsors left that don't do that, when you have been time in the business you get to know who you can trust based on your own experience and acquaintances.

That is why I promote Playboy (in between many others), I fully trust them, their brand and their tracking system.

Avoiding skimming is just like knowing what sponsor will sell better, only experience can tell you that for sure.