How many contact attempts do you make, and how long do you wait before you...
 

Block an affiliate or Member account from your program or site?

Ex. You suspect them (with reasonable cause) of cheating or theft. You have made at least 5 or 6 attempts at contacting them using information that they provided, and they have not yet responded.

Where do you draw the line?

Thanks,
Bill

five or six attempts should be enough. i would think

5-6 attempts? I think you have reached that line. But thats me. I also dont have an affiliate program. So my opinion is even less. But 5-6 times I think you have did your part.

That's what I would think also. Let me add also to the example, that the attempts were made over the course of a couple of weeks, and the accounts in question are your biggest bandwith users. :(

5 or 6 attempts in like 30 minutes? Or are we talking days?

(with reasonable cause) of cheating or theft -- and you waited to try to contact them 5 or 6 times... and did they keep cheating you that time, too long... 2 or 3 times.. the just kill their account if you have reasonable cause, why dick around with them?

Over 2 or 3 weeks. The numbers were there almost immediately, so I began trying to contact the people a couple of weeks ago.

2 reasons, basically same issue for both users...

One is an affiliate. I have asked some other program owners about the trend, and they all agree this guy has probably ripped the site and put it into an AVS. The AVS is on a freehost. Neither the affiliate or the host has returned my messages.

The other user is a member, but he has well over 140 logins in only a couple of weeks, and he is in the top 2 bandwith users according to my stats. I'm talking a mountain to a mole hill difference between him and the next lower user. I suspected password trading, but there are only a few ip's (2 or 3) he has logged in from.

for an affiliate i would freeze the account until i get an answer ( some people take holydays , especially this time of the year) freeze the revenue , then if you don't get any answer after 60 days just cancel the account . as for members , what do you expect ? some people take trials and just download all your content in the shortest time as they can , 2 to 10 different ip's doesn't mean pass sharing , my ip changes every 6 hours or so.

if you have someone burning bandwith with more than 10 ip's then you should consider buying some script to prevent multiple ip's . personally i cancel an account after 4 different IP simultaneous .

just my :2 cents:

Where do the IP's resolve?

All of them resolve to locales in the US. I don't want to be more specific on that right now other than to say they are all from the West Coast (CA) because of security issues.

Send the affiliate registered express mail with a polite letter informing them of why you are suspending their account. It's in writing and you'll have a return receipt.

Even an email should be sufficient, if your system shows it has been delivered then there is not much more you can do to ensure they see it. :2 cents:

We send the affiliate an email an we suspend his account. We don't do it without very serious reasons. Then we wait for him to contact us to resolve the issue. Some of them reply to the email, some write to us after they missed one payement, but in most case they were caugth and they don't even bother contacting us.

For members it's a bit different. A member sharing his login/psw with other is still a paying member. He is just using more bandwidth. The account get suspended if we detect that the login/psw is in the open, available for all. But if it's a small group using the account, it's only warnings and stuff, a paying customer is something you don't want to cut :)

my :2 cents: