Ever wonder if maybe those "scrubbing" days are something else
 

What if it wasn't scrubbing at all? What if its not a program that was shaving, but the actual billing company? Would anyone really notice?

Of course I am not accusing anyone of shaving, just playing a little devils advocate.

monthly billing should = members , so it should be easily spotted anyways

lots of factors go into daily signups, some days I get more from europe and asia then from the US and some days I get more from the US then all the other places. For the most part, I dont think its shaving or scrubbing but just generally how much extra money people have.

But on the topic of scrubbing and shaving, allot fo billing companies do block what are referred to as "high risk countries", Any more, I dont think that hold true for allot of the high risk countries, I am getting more and more signups from places like russia and argentina and so on, I have even removed most of the former high risk countries from my scrub. As for shaving, well, usually if its to good to be true it probably is, you can bet your ass that the website is going to make money and if they say they are giving you 1,2,3 and sometimes 4 times the amount of their membership then you may wan to watch things close just in case.

No I know what scrubbing is, but on these days when everyone assumes that "_____ is scrubbing again," what if they weren't really scrubbing more heavily than usual, just not reporting all the joins that were coming in?

thats possible, I am sure there are allot of sites who really do not want to pay out to affilliates what they say they will pay out. A website can get its self in a position where its paying out more then the owner is taking home, so why not keep some extra for himself..

I'm not talking about websites here, I am talking about the billing companies themselves.

Not sure what you mean exactly.

I mean if a program is doing 100 joins a day, and one day every 5 days they do 97, do you think they would really notice? And if you spread that across however many hundreds or even thousands of sites a billing companies processes for, thats a nice chunk of change. Just seems to me that it would go unnoticed.

I would never even think about billing companies doing that, they get their money, they have no reason to steal like that.

how difficult is it to correlate user/passwd logs etc. ? it's pretty simple - silly hypothesis/suggestion imho

Thats not the point either, and furthermore there is no hypothesis in this thread, and I wasn't suggesting that any billing company does this.

Im saying if the billing company was shaving joins , there would be more members names ( username/password ) created than paying members.

Like if the billing company was shaving 3 joins a day every 5 days and the program had 100 joins a day

Thats 3000 "real" joins a month and 2982 reported , then there would be 18 more usernames/passwords than paid memberships to the sponsor ..

Billing companies scrub to keep their clients (and themselves) below 1% chargeback. Their scrubbing evolves from a day to another when they decide to band a bank or a whole country. I think they change it also when their client get too close to the 1% chargeback during a month.

But this is only one factor among a dozen other ones that makes the number of join change from one day to another. And the less join you make, the more difficult it is to see the picture.

Also, billing companies don't make money out of scrubing. When they scrub, the customer is not billed and he's not granted access to the members area.

My :2 cents:

hehe, what he said.

The only company that any one on this board ever complains about scrubbing is, ccbill. And do you think that a company like that would risk the money they make for a little that is " scrubbed " into their pockets???

I dont. On top of that they would face federal charges for fraud for doing that, and it's not worth it.

Famailar with the term greed?

True, but is this really crosschecked that often?

hell yes- have you ever owned a site?

I'm not naming any companies, but I wouldn't put it past anyone or any company to do whatever they could to make an extra buck. Look at Enron for example.

Yeah, not one that does thousands of joins though.

I agree with what's said above: a billing processor can scrub harder, but not shave. If they shave and don't grant the member access, it woud probably lead to a chargeback which affects them, not just the merchant.

Again as said above, I think closeness to chargeback threshhold would be th enumebr one reason why scrub might be more/less on any given day. It doesn't even have to be because of your individual account, it could be because of the overall average (depending what type or account you have with the processor).

However there are also reasons why sites might make more sales on some days than others. Let's say for a paysite, they update the content sometimes on Wed, sometimes on Fri, sometimes on Mon. The day they add new content, maybe signups are higher that day.

Or say a better example with dating, Monday is almost always our highest signup day because that's the day we mail people who chose to only get matches sent once a week. This increases our traffic and signups that day.

There are many factors and in the end, I don't think billing processors shave or try to steal your money; the few bucks here and there, is not worth losing clients or potential clients over a bad reputation :2 cents:

Can you even imagine how hard shit would hit the fan if processor was proved (fairly easy to do) to shave?

If the processor shaved, took the money, but did not update the member database and password database, then the person charged would not be able to get on the site. They would chargeback and that processor's entire business would be jepordized by getting too many chargebacks.


Sorry, it would not make sense to do that. It would only hurt the processor. :2 cents:

scrubbing? isn't this something to do with chio and his bs blogs

well, charging and not creating member passwords, would 99% of the time result in a charge back, that strategy would obviously not work very well.

More logical strategy would be to create member passwords but not give the paysite owner the money, as long as the percentage of not paid members is not very high, the paysite owner would not notice, and even if they did, the processor could play the "you server must have been hacked" card.

But I really doubt this is happening, processors have WAY too much to risk to try to steal few signups here and there.