Kim, Skyboy... you're right. 1, I've never run a sponsor program, hell, I'm a newcommer to the adult industry myself, and I trust that as veterans, you are able to pick out cheaters by their actions better than I would be, given the same facts and information.

I didn't mean to tell you how to do your job, yet, as an American, and as someone who involved in the business of network security, that oftentimes what appears to be evidence of cheating can be not quite the case.

I mean.. as a program admin, it isn't easy. You see something questionable and of course you want to drop them immediately.. I dunno, again, I've never run one myself and perhaps if I did I would change my outlook, but nevertheless my current perspective tells me that I would pay them their last check and drop them from the progam, no questions asked. Ok, so they cheated me out of some money.. well, their networking skills were better than mine, so I got fucked out of a couple hundred bucks, so be it. If I feel that I was cheated I will make it publically known on message boards such as this.

However, not paying someone for past monies is dicey.. I mean, did they cheat to earn all of it? Part of it?

I dunno.. without getting into the legal mumbo jumbo, I think in these situations the best call is to pay someone their last check and drop them from the progam because you are suspicous.. is that not reasonable?

booker -- since you are new, I am going to suggest that you go and read the terms carefully on any of your sponsors you use.

I am not saying this to be mean or to put you down, I am telling you to be aware of the terms you agree to when you send traffic.

If you cheat, attempt to cheat, get caught doing either of the two with every sponsor I know of, you have forfeited your right to ANY money you claim they legitimately owe you.

Sponsors don't go after cheaters in court for the money they paid out before they found fraud -- in most cases its not a big amount and wouldn't be worth the effort of winning a judgement on a case by case basis. Even with a judgement your chances of getting money from deadbeats is near impossible.

Only real morons start out trying to cheat at high levels, most start small to test their sponsors fraud detection. Then they get a bit bolder and get found out.

However, when you start adding up 30 bucks here, 60 bucks there, times a few thousand resellers, you are talking about real money that only hurts every person in the program.

Kim... fair enough, if the original agreement is that if someone is caught cheating that they forfeit any and all money, then the person paying out can of course withhold any and all money.

Still, if I was running a program, I would want to be 99.99% sure that it was in fact cheating and not a misunderstanding or attack by a 3rd party, and for that reason I would contact the person in question before deleting their account.

However, it appears as though you had overwhelming evidence (his saying the site was old yet referrals from the day before, etc) and I am not chastizing you for your decision. It seems like this industry is a self-policing one, and that with message boards like this and many others, that if you are respectful of the rules and the industry and put in the time, that you can be very profitable without cheating, which is always the best way to go about it.

Specifically, as a newcommer developing a couple sites and generating traffic over the last 6 months, I am interested in meeting some more people in the industry, an aim/email/icq contact with you would be fantastic if you are interested.

I've never cheated a sponsor, and nnever would, I do plenty well doing it legit but...you know if a sponsor told me that upfront there's no way in hell I'd bother trying out his program.

If someone tells me I'm guilty until proven innocent they can kiss my hairy ass.

"oftentimes what appears to be evidence of cheating can be not quite the case"

Quick Review of the evidence:
It seemed that the guy had a scam page on HIS domain. Sales were reffered from that scam page. Screen shot is taken showing exact url, his domain and content of the page. Logs show that the scam has been going on for weeks. Scam page mysteriously disapears after his account gets canceled.

I don't think you can get any more solid evidence than this.

Someone would have to go through a lot of trouble to screw some webmaster over: buy a domain, put victims name in whois database, host the domain, and then use his own credit card to sign up, or send his own traffic so people would sign up. And, do this for weeks.

I think it's WAY more likely that he was screwing the sponsor, than some guy was trying to screw him.

Cancelling person's account and not paying is the least a sponsor should do, given the evidence presented. If I saw numerous sign ups from the scam page, I would probably even go as far as e-mailing the screenshot to his other sponsors, if any.

Ah woj, excellent summation -- and did I mention the cheater admitted it was his domain as well. For some reason he thought telling me he changed the subdomain structure foiled the hackers and thus proved that he didn't do it.

Of course a 1/12 ratio with a few joins from tgp traffic is also a dead giveaway something is up, but thats another matter entirely.

Thank God I was 1:50 last pay period! I'll make sure to blind link you guys in a few places, just to be on the safe side.

booker, this is where noobs get into trouble.
operators are ALWAYS at LEAST 99.9% sure that someone is cheating before they are canned.
We have the experience and the tools to catch cheaters in ways you can't imagine and in ways we don't talk about.

Operators don't kill good accounts. how the hell will they make money that way?:winkwink:

ummm, arn't you new to a sponser program as well (maybe even newer then the guy you're giving advice to)since you were just a sexertary banker before?

WHAT ABOUT THAT .1% that got FALSLY ACCUSED???????


WHAT ABOUT THEM?????

No soup for them. Next!

I wasn't speaking about myself, but operators in general. As has been proven ad nauseam, I'm never wrong.

For the other operators, that .1% are the guys they know are cheating but can't quite say how.

Like if you did 10 sales a day, your sponsor would know you inflated your numbers to an unrealistic # . They wouldn't need to know how, its obvious that a "sleezydream" couldn't do that kind of volume. :1orglaugh

touche.

this is why I run a free site and just give the porn away to the masses. Why bother with all the processing hastle?

dude, I hear ya.

A moment in Histroy.....12 nipples agrees with Sleazy .....does this mean 12 will be at the next Sleazy Dinner...?

the world is waiting.

depends, is he willing to wear the funny hat and serve big macs?

I'll where the hat but I won't eat or serve big macs. :1orglaugh

"I'll where the hat..."?? Not very wise today. Have a late night with your boyfriend?

12 I went to the last dinner and it was nice...much better than a big mac.

DEATH to cheaters :ak47: :mad:

Hello ding ding is anything rattling around in that encephalitis sized head of yours?

Before I went to CCBill I did the webmaster stuff for Cashquest for a year.

I forgot, that's when you were still trying to figure out how to spell Supersize correctly at hamburger university.

While I'm certainly sorry that we'll be missing out on your traffic, it's no sweat to me. I want webmasters who are going to read and FOLLOW my TOS, but if I have 5000 webmasters who follow the rules and make me money, why should I waste any time with someone trying to cheat me or not following my TOS? So, if being a hard ass keeps some people from signing up for my program, great, more money for the webmasters who can follow my TOS.

Hmm, good point.

Generally it is bad policy to speculate as to what someone else knows or doesn't know about network security, because more often than not it is an underestimate. Regardless, I'm sure your system is tight as far as any average joe is concerned.

For someone with a little savvy, a site like this cheater's could pretty handily be hacked and manipulated without a trace. I've had it done to sites that I've been involved in, the gov't. has it done to their sites, large corporations have it done to their's. I highly doubt that the level of internet security in the porn industry exceedes that of other industries.

As far as being hard ass.. sure, it works, you keep the honest ones and boot the cheaters and perhaps a few suspected cheaters.. but is that the best way to do business? To maximize profit and reduce aggrivation, probably. Is that the most important thing, however?

It's the only way to do business....who doesn't want to maximize profitablility? I'm in this business to make money....anyone standing in the way of that by cheating or not following rules doesn't deserve courtesy...

Anyone here not wanting to maximise their profitability? just go ahead and start directing your traffic to me and let me know profitability is not important, so I can set your partner % to zero.

Fair enough :rasta

My point exactly...

booker, honey, this isn't about network security in the end. It's about the myriad excuses coupled with the fantastical lies people tell to cover their tracks.

If you have 10000 people doing something, you can easily see patterns among them, and you learn what patterns generally indicate something isn't right.

At that point you start looking into it, and if you pay attention to the details, you find the cheat, document it and that's the end of the discussion.

Until you find the cheat, you have two choices. Keep paying and looking, or see if there are other things that you can find violating the TOS that will help you to get rid of someone in that last .01%.

AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST:
My little cheater emailed me and wanted to know if he got canned because he signed up under his own ref code since he wanted that 30 bucks too.

Not since he was testing us for shaving, but because he wanted some extra money.

Where is the BOL when you need it Sykkster?

Sponsors are the exact same way and it's a little hypocritical to act like you guys are under attack from an army of thieves.

I'm a perfectly typical, honest webmaster and I get shaved all the time, I get lied to, I get ignored. This business is as slippery as a bucket fulla snakes.

Which is I guess why I love it.

right here
http://www.gothicsex.com/brick/brick.gif

but wait til you see the shovel of understanding......

There most certainly does seem to be an "us against them" attitude, but I'm not just a psponsor, I am also a webmaster who sends his hard earned traffic to sponsors as well...

if I fuck up and make a mistake that is against a program's TOS and get terminated for it, it's my own tough shit for not following the rules....I remember my first Rush4Gold boot...I didn't even know what a blindlink was much less why it was against Pushrod's TOS...did I still deserve to get paid for doing something clearly against the rules, even though I made a "newbie mistake"? No, because the program and profit margin was based upon a certain type of traffic, and when I fucked with that, it changed it.


Don't get me wrong, being a hard ass doesn't mean I'm just going to look for reasons to terminate people, it just means that I won't put up with bullshit when I do terminate them, nor should I...nor any other sponsor who terminates a webmaster for breaking the rules.

HAHAHAHAHA
Did pushrod pay anyone? Ever?

Pushrod paid me for long time.
But thinking about it, I have never received my last check from Rush4Gold when they went bust. Their site is still up. Feel free to sign up hehehe

http://stats.rush4gold.com/

LOL im on my way

he did in '97 hehehe (well, after I learned my lesson and started actually reading and UNDERSTANING the terrms ;))

not sure about now, though ;)

After reading all of this I have one conclusion.

I will not be doing any business with SIC Cash.

Why?

Just because.

If I make an honest mistake I am fucked out of my living.

I don't like that kind of business.

Killerelf, please don't do business with me either then.
If you've just read thru this entire thread, and think its about honest mistakes, you're either a thief, or too stupid for this biz.:winkwink:

Jimmy, because you only see things from the webmaster pont of view, your conclusions are incorrect.

As a program operator, I know first hand that we *ARE* under attack from an army of thieves.

As a sender of traffic to most of the major programs, I've NEVER felt cheated by them.

If operators weren't vigilant about fraud, there would be no one left to pay you money.

think about THAT for a while when you insist we're too tough on thieves.

So as I see it, not contacting the guy to get his side of the story, but just automatically closing him down is fine. You could not possibly be making a mistake.

Unless you are protecting photographers rights, then you have to soft foot it and be a nice understanding guy.

Imagine dealing with cheating idiots like this 10 times a day, for 6 years and you are in another mans shoes.

I will not mention his name, but it is funny the attitude taken when the boot is on the other foot.:)

HAHHAAHha.. that's great :)


quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by Killerelf
After reading all of this I have one conclusion.

I will not be doing any business with SIC Cash.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I wouldn't jump to conclusions that quickly man.. I dont' have a lot of traffic on my infant sites, but I do have an account with SIC and haven't had my problems myself. It seems to me that while hardass, kimmykim and whomever else are straightforward about their stance on cheating/etc AND that they are consistant. Being consistant in one's policy goes a long way in my book, even if I think their policy might be a little harsh to some. I wouldn't bail on SIC right away just because of this thread, in fact, perhaps the opposite, we've had a pretty good discussion here about how they do their business and they have been very forthcomming. Can't bitch at 'em for that, certainly.


And again, charly makes a great point that the volume of cheaters or potential cheaters makes it all that much harder to deal with them personally. It's a tough biz and there's a middle ground, and of course if the number of people trying to steal and theive goes up, program ops are going to react, tighten up their policy and bring the axe down without asking questions. Well hey, they are putting out a lot of effort to not only make themselves rich but provide a pretty easy means for others to make a decent living as well, so more power to 'em.