TopBucks raising their minimum Epass payouts to $200 - Anyone else concerned???
 

I just got this e-mail from TopBucks:

Dear Affiliate:

Starting on the September 8th payout, some of our payment options will have their minimum withholding amount raised from $50. Checks and Direct Deposit will now have a minimum of $100 and ePassporte will have a minimum of $200.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding your account, please contact us.

Thank you,
The TB Staff

Should I be concerned about this? Nothing good comes from raising the minimum payout so much, right?

I mean, I always reach at least $400 per pay period with them, but this move scares me a little.

Not only did their conversions dropped a lot to me recently, but they also seem to be delaying Epass payouts lately. I should have got my payment on the 15th, and it's already the 19th and the payment is not there yet!

Anyone else noticed this? Anyone else worried??

:(:helpme

Why should you be concerned?

why would yoube concerned it might be something from there bank for writting to many checks or putting to many deposits into epass

Ok, you guys are telling me that a raise from $50 payouts to $200, plus delays don't concern you at all?????

Those could all be pretty bad signs. If a company is having liquidity problems delaying payments (either by increasing time to payout or increasing payout limit) could be a way to finance their operation at the expense of affiliates

There's no fucking delay, they've been paying you early.

They send out the epassporte payments way before the checks and wires. I'm not sure why they do, but they do. Nowhere in any terms does it say you get paid for the period the day the period ends. Get serious here.

The $200 is for Epass and $100 for Checks. ANY PROGRAM paying a higher PPS and paying out via Epass, has lots of fraud to deal with every period.

Since the payout was so low before, they couldn't always tell if it was fraud or not, they don't have enough transactions to look at - even the processors can't always tell on just a couple of sales.

I would think you should be happy as piss that they kept epass when all the other programs are dropping them.

Didn't someone else try this recently and then re-change the policy when people bitched about it here?

Ok, you are right. I just checked and noticed that some months they pay me up to the 23th, so I can't really complain about delays, 1 week after the period is ok. For some reason I thought they held payments for a month after the pay period, that's why I expected it to be on the 15, 16. But you are right, my bad.

Lol, "all" the other programs are dropping Epass? Name 3 programs, please. I remember Epic dropped Epass, but after a couple of months brought it back.

And since when is $30/sale is "higher PPS"? I have been a TopBucks affiliate for years now, I don't think they are much concerned about fraud with my account also.

Yes, Naughty America did this, and EVERYONE complained. I don't understand why everybody was concerned about Naughty America and not with TopBucks!

And yes, NA did change their policy back after all the complaints.

Why would we be worried? I don't understand?

More than 3 programs have dropped epass, GFY isn't the news center for adult. I didn't post I dropped it here, why would I? Do you remember when Duke$ dropped it? No, well probably because you don't promote 1000 programs at once.

And if you really have a problem with TB, payouts, epass, whatever - why post it here? Last I checked, this isn't the contact form for TB. Clearly, the min payout is not an issue for you - so why even bitch or care? Post count, to look cool, to tell people you are on the scale of taking epass payments? Sorry, had to add that in.

this became a thread? what did topbucks say about it?

They posted yesterday in a different thread and said something like, if you are having a problem reaching min payouts, contact Sly and he will work with you on making the min payout. :thumbsup

Hi Tranza and others,

Our choice to raise the Epassporte minimums to $200 was based on the excessive amount of fraud that occurs with webmasters who choose the Epassporte payment method. Because we are unable to cross reference Epassporte account information with our own black lists we want to discourage the use of Epassporte, yet still provide this option to those webmasters who do legitimate business. The higher minimum will provide more data for us to review possible fraud ocurring.

We offer other payments options including direct deposit for those in the U.S.

Tranza, please contact us directly about your specific instance with your epassporte pay out and we can look into. However, payments are not sent on the 15th, they are sent by the 22nd and the 7th of each month and have been that way since TopBucks was established.

Feel free to contact me if you need any additional information.


~Alli

It is dont good :(

This chicken little stuff is ridiculous.

Raising minimum payouts is in no way a reflection of a company's financial viability. You guys should get into political conspiracies or 911 conspiracies, those seem much more fun.

leave it up to tranza to cry like a little bitch about something that doesnt effect him at all.

Not in the least. Actually a smart business move IMHO. Waste of time and resources to deal with a ton of smaller payments every pay period.

And there we go.

Actually, I do remember it. And I do promote Duke. And they still offer Epass, all you have to do is ask.

:2 cents:

now i am as clever as before

Alli,
GREAT reason and we are considering doing the same thing for the very same reasons.

Good see, some programs have and continue to drop Epass, so be happy that TB only increased the min payout rather than dropping the option all together. I personally paid on a one month delay with epass, I guess it just depends on how the program wishes to deal with the fraud.

You may be able to ask and get special treatment through Duke$, I can't say what private deals they do and I don't ask.

But looking at the signup form you can see they don't offer it, which means they don't have any dumps or reports for it. That's just how nats works, I don't have to log into the admin and see the epass dump has zero resellers. But as you said, all you have to do is ask - so who knows.

What does fraud have to do with it?
The sponsor is paying me to my epass account.
Where the heck is the fraud in that?
How the heck does not paying me to my legit account reduce fraud?

One should not mix issues here.
A sponsor accepting a payment from epass for porn is absolutely not the same as a sponsor making a payment through epass to a trusted long time affiliate.

The delay in making payment to affiliates and the minimum dollars paid are two separate issues. Slightly increasing the delay to pay may be a legit way to reduce fraud, quadrupling the minimum payout...that's just smoke and mirrors and is not related to fraud reduction at all.

it's way too simple - if I owe you $1 million and pay you on the 1 of March instead of 1st of January I'll make $10 000 in terest if I have the money in a bank (6% yearly interest for the sake of this argument)

so Topbucks will profit from this move and they can spin it any way they want to, that doesn't change the fact


now kids, can you guess who's the one to lose? :1orglaugh

What he said. It amazes me that so many people don't see this.

:2 cents:

Nailed it right on the head :thumbsup

And another one to nail it.

It truly amazes me how dumb some people are, to defend this move.

we're talking about $51-99 checks being delayed a few weeks. they will pay more in postage and accounting fees than they could possibly ever gain in interest.

lets say it costs them $2 to get a $50 check to someone in accounting and postage. thats 4% of the payment just to get it to them, if someone cant wait an extra few weeks to get their $50 then i wouldnt even want to deal with them as an affiliate. i dont see $100 minimum payout being unreasonable at all.

I can answer you with basic logic... It's 1, 2, 3, just follow me.

If you have a $50 min payout, that's 2 sales to get paid.
If you have a $200 min payout, that's 5-6 sales.

So, either a frauding webmaster will have to produce 5-6 sales in a period, probably flagging them at the processor level, stopping all sales from that point, which is what us programs want. Or, they will role into two periods, giving the program a chance to have not paid on the first round of fraud, and still giving the processor a better chance to catch if the program missed it.

What's more amazing is, fraudulent webmasters actually send real sales with frauded cc sales, even on accounts that have been paid legit funds in the past. They also contact the program and ask why they haven't been paid, and argue that it isn't fraud, even threat they will take it to the boards.

Now, I'm really good at explaining things like 30 different ways for, slower people. If you need me to explain it again, a different way, I will.

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh yeah right

It's $200 for Epass. Not $100. So you're talking about $51-$199 payouts. They pay $0 postage on those. They also pay $0 in fees since they deduct it from the payment.

I love math, It's a fun game when you actually use the correct information.

Programs promote other programs in exits, xsales, trades, upsells, ect ect ect.
Programs that pay via epass, take epass payments.
The Epassporte payments taken in are sent out to Webmasters.
Epassporte does not earn interest.
Funding your Epass account would eat up any interest you may earn.

as an aside - wouldn't a fraudster bang up more than $200 in sales anyway - if they're going to do fraudulent sign-ups would they do just three?

makes sense to me, fly by night webmasters are going to use epassporte, versus checks for instance, and it is hard to tell whether something is fraud from just a few sales

the fraud guys hit the biggest PPS programs much more than the others and in some cases, they set up a number of affiliate and epass accounts and just send enough to break the min. amounts on each one, with less data per account, its much harder to detect than sending 20 sales through one account

although to minimize any disruption to current users, tb may want to consider that for new accounts only and if you had been getting paid for 6 months or more, keep the current settings

Boy, you're dumb. We are talking about older webmasters, that have already proved to be legit. Webmasters that have years of history with them. Why the fuck would such webmasters try to scam a sponsor out of $50 in the first place?? Makes no sense at all.

You want to implement this to new webmasters, sure go ahead, I support the decision 100%. But doing this to all webmasters just show that they want to keep the funds on their accounts a while longer, either to gain interests or because they are under financial problems. Period.

Have you noticed how every time a program closes, a few months before it starts changing it's TOS to increase the minimum payouts and then start delaying the payments? That's why I'm concerned. And just to make it clear, I was wrong, TopBucks never delayed a payout to me. But if they started doing this, it would be a HUGE red flag.

i supposed you have never had to load $ into epass? its not cheap. not to mention theres no reverse fraud prevention like paypal has. i wont do transfers on epass without someone i know because of this. any russian can scam a program thru epass and disappear easily.

do you think its harder to catch a batch of 1-2 fraudulent sales or a batch of 10-20 from the same person?

Exactly, fighting fraud by delaying payouts for new affiliates makes sense, but raising minimum payouts for all affiliates serves only one goal: earning interest.

provide some examples, otherwise you're talking out of your ass.

Hi if you have any questions regarding the min payout change feel free to icq me. My number is 175789972.

ok, I'm dumb? I'm not the one calling out programs that actually did pay me.

And since this does not effect you, as you stated, and now with the information you have.... what do you care? Why keep posting about it?

I have "NEVER" noticed a major program that has set off red flags like you stated. I may have forgotten about one but nothing ever the size of TB that I know of has ever done something like you might have thought was going on.

from here: fucking-around-and-business-discussion/848807-companies-raising-payouts.html

You have my ICQ... do you need help with something? Send me a message and I can go over whatever your issue is, no problem. At times somebody may slip past me, but I do my absolute best not to ignore anyone... big or small.

All companies with reps have a bad ones, that doesn't mean everyone on the team is.

I haven't ever seen Sly or Kristin not help the little or big guy, equally. They have had some other great, experienced reps in the past too. Both know exactly how to sling traffic, and Kristin can run programs on her own, I don't know of all of Sly's skills.

I don't think you can get much more skilled and professional reps than those two. Actually, I would challenge you to find one other program with two higher skilled reps than those two.

You are foolish and arrogant to assume people around you are slow.
Your reply has no basis in logic or in reality.

To think that major credit card processors need 7 or more days to catch fraudulent transactions is complete ridiculous.
If it took them seven days to catch up with the fraud they would all be broke and shut down exactly one week ago.

You obviously have no idea how vast, intricate and efficient the global credit card system is.

Once again, quadrupling the minimum payout is not a fraud reduction measure.

Ok, I'm done arguing. It's clear that some people care about this, while others don't care at all.

Personally, I haven't been affected yet. But I do think that such changes may have been done because of financial problems, otherwise they could implement this to new webmasters only. And that scares me, since I like TopBucks.

Doc: I'm not calling out Topbucks, I clearly stated that I was concerned and asked what people thought about it.

Beemk: recently a HUGE AVS program did this, and a lot of webmasters lost a lot of money. You can search GFY if you want, this thread is not about them.

I'm sure they deal with more fraud that most here can imagine. If the payout is too high just find one of thousands of other sponsors. I'd imagine 90% of the time scammers LOVE getting paid by Epass.