account terminated at quickbucks :(
 

I signed up with Quickbucks after they introduced the program a few months ago and made a couple of galleries, freesites, and bought some galleryspots from choker promoting one of their sites. The ratios weren't great, so I left it at that and have had a couple of sales per month since then. I checked e-mail today and found out that Quickbucks has terminated my affiliate account for fraud. No further explanation was offered.

I ICQ'd hooper, who told me that my sale this week came from a stolen credit card number so they could only assume fraud. I suppose if were in a position to send more traffic they might spend a little more time to figure out if I was trying to screw them out of $25 or if I just had the misfortune of sending a crooked surfer.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what a small webmaster can do to make sure that the programs they are working with will at least give them the benefit of the doubt if they send a fraudulent sale?

I think it's stupid to cancel an account over one fraud sale. I mean c'mon.

One instance of fraud and they can your account? That's ridiculous. Probably not much you can do but try talking some sense into Hooper or just move on to the next sponsor.

If it is just one bad signup, then that does suck :(

I'll see if I can get Hooper over here to comment on things :)

Sorry guys, we dont make a habit of disclosing the EXACT details of fraud when it happens.

There are certain indicators that tend to occur that our system watches for that have proven to be valid indicators of reseller fraud.

Yes, believe it or not, low volume resellers are much more likely to perpetrate fraud against affiliate programs because they choose to perpetrate the fraud against many programs in low volume rather than one program in high volume (sort of a dont put your eggs in one basket philosophy).

So the answer is partially yes, if you had been sending significant volume than a single instance of fraud would not be an indicator of reseller fraud, but when 100% of your sales are fraudulent and other metrics also support it, we terminate accounts without question.

Bottom line here is that our numbers are our numbers, we trust them, they have kept us in business for 6 years and we are not going to abandon them today because one reseller out of more than 150 that we have terminated in the past 12 months is unhappy about it.

JMHO, but whining about it in public forums definitely wont help you.

Hooper - I'm going to play devil's advocate here & since I've never run a paysite program other than thru CCBill, please feel free to shoot me down :)

If this guy had one signup that used a bad card, why boot him completely out of the program?

Why not inform him that sign up is going to be taken away & the reasons behind it & then just internally flag his account for future reference?

In the end it is your program & you can do as you see fit with it, but based on what's posted here (I of course have no knowledge of any fact other then that) this seems a tad bit harsh, especially towards who I assume is a newbie.

Like I said, I'm not here to start a war - just want to understand things a little better :)

sure, i can understand that pov from a reseller standpoint, but like i said, the metrics havent done us wrong.

so lets theoretically say that this person had sent exactly one sale each period for 1 month... ignoring any individual sale or any individual period that would put him at a 25% fraud rate which is still unbelievably high.

i'm not saying it's not possible for somebody to have bad luck with this kind of system, and i'm not saying that i dont feel for him or see his point of view.

but if our system screams fraud at the top of it's lungs, he's running at a high chargeback rate, and i then refund all the sales he's ever made, and i've already paid him several times... what is there that indicates that i should send this guy more money?

his account cost me a good deal of money.

I can see the 25% rule for the fraud alarm to go off, but a 1/4 should be ignored & everything over 2/8 should be terminated (once can happen, twice is a tread - LOL)

I often find myself in a similar situation with my blacklist - I'm sure that for every 100 domains I put oin there, 99 deserve it & 1 doesn't - but like you, we have alarms & whatnot that determine who gets on the blacklist.

airdick - it doesn't sound like you lost too much money here - I'd write it off & move on.

eman - the "principle and honour" thing is thrown out the window in a case like this, seeing as no one would have ever known about it had airdick not brought it to the board.

You're right, it's not much money and that's why it seems so silly to suspect fraud. I'm not a webmaster hidden away in some far off country or a teenager safe from prosecution in his parent's basement. If I ever go insane and choose credit card fraud as a career you can bet I'll be going for more than $25!

If the e-mail from Quickbucks had been more than the single line "Your QuickBuck account has been terminated for fraud" I probably wouldn't have bothered posting. If it just said something like "Your QuickBuck account has been terminated for excessive chargebacks" it would be a bit easier to just take my lumps and move on. Opening my e-mail and seeing the word "fraud" staring me in the face makes me feel sick.

I know that at least three other affiliate programs that I've sent signups to on a regular basis over the past year terminate or convert to revshare for excessive chargebacks. Fortunately none of those programs seem to have a problem with the surfers I've been sending.

I can only imagine that as visa regs get tighter and margins get slimmer that affiliate programs are going to get even more nervous and "shoot first and ask questions later" when it comes to higher than average chargebacks. Maybe pay-per-active user will be only type of program left in the future.

Thanks for providing this forum. It's good to have a place to get this off my chest and hear thoughts and comments from other webmasters.