I mean if your AM clearly can see fruad happening he doesn't report it? That is what your saying(maxsteve). Or your saying he does but he picks and chooses who to report at his will. If that is the case then there is some kind of guideline for this. It seems rather funny op said he didn't blank ref at all. Yet the whole time he gets emails saying good job.
This will be my last post in this thread. The thread is currently spinning in circles. People are commenting without reading the entire thread, or commenting after misreading both the OP's and my points. There really isn't any new information to add to the thread - and I certainly have nothing futher to add after this post.
When AM's see fraud, they report it to our compliance department immediately for further investigation. However, when an affiliate is using redirects to hide where there traffic is coming from, AM's cannot see the fraud. In the specific case that raised this thread, the affiliate was redirecting Instagram comment spam through one of his own domains to hide the true source of the traffic. The AM did NOT know the traffic was coming from Instagram and we only caught the pub when we investigated a user complaint.
Affiliate payments cease as soon as they are terminated. This isn't a policy that is exclusive to MaxBounty, but is in place with all networks. This isn't even something we hide - it's laid out clearly in our terms. Sometimes an affiliate's balance is positive, sometimes an affiliate's balance is negative. Sometimes an advertiser will pay for some of the leads, sometimes an advertiser will pay for none of the leads. In the long run, it balances out and does NOT represent a profit for us (in fact, it's typically more of a loss). While some will still think it's a crappy policy, please understand that a change to this policy would mean that we would be forced to either litigate or send collection agencies after any affiliate who was paid out, terminated and for which we were subsequently not paid. Does anyone really want that?
Any network that knowingly allows their affiliates to violate terms and conditions or worse, encourages it, because "everyone's making the monies" will quickly find out that is a very short sighted approach to running a network. They'll either find themselves on the wrong end of a lawsuit, or will find themselves insolvent when enough merchants decide they aren't paying for this kind of traffic. The affiliate marketing landscape is littered with failed CPA networks who thought they'd make a quick buck by operating with an "anything goes" policy.
As I've said before, I don't blame people for getting upset when their accounts are terminated. It's a natural reaction to bad news. I do find it a bit odd that the same people who BREAK the rules that are CLEARLY laid out by us will come out and claim that we are the ones who are cheating.
