Quote:
Originally Posted by Carmine
So you knew about it?
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Let me explain.
We had an affiliate manager named Jeff K if there were ever problems with payments he was the guy to talk to. Quite often, webmasters who knew me directly they would come to me and I would help them sort it out. What I notice starting to happen was I was getting way too many complaints.
Sometime around 2006 we were hosting with Navasite. I actually never wanted to go to them because I knew National Net was the better company. There was a period of almost 4 months where are sites when out daily (sometimes days at a time). So JC decided to stop paying them until they got their shit together.
JC assumed that during that 4 months we were getting free hosting and you will have to remember this is when hosting was really expensive. Once they finally had us back up they billed us for $120,000. Meanwhile, JC decided to use this money as his own personal piggy bank and went on a four month bender in Vegas. Sometimes we couldn't get a hold of the "president" of our company for days at a time.
Navisite finally wound up sending us a bill for 120k and we couldn't pay it. They wound up taking us to court and we lost.
After we lost in court, the amount of emails I was getting from affiliates spiked. I figured for every one person that was contacting me, 10 people were contacting Jeff, so when I was out in Vegas I confronted JC about it, who is mailing the checks at the time.
He told me, "There are certain affiliates that always know when they are getting paid and I send out those checks, but there're a ton of other ones I just don't send them and they never ask." So basically, he was robbing from our affiliates to pay what we have lost in court.
This infuriated me because I was the "face" of the company, also a Webmaster, and nobody knew him.
I told him that this shit has got to stop because I opposed this vehemently, if anyone ever figured it out it was all going to come back on me, I throught it was wrong and could kill the company. He said that we HAD do it because we "didn't" have the money.
JC burst into one of his trademark steroid rages and that ended anything beneficial that could've come from that conversation.
Not long after that, JC stopped sending out the checks and turned it over to some accounting firm in Vegas and some CPA named Katie was the main point of contact. I'm sure many reading this thread are familiar with her. This created a buffer between the company and the money. Again, I was only told about his after it happened. Not that I had a real problem with it, because I figured it would stop the shenanigans.
Once they had Katie in place, how it appeared to me, was if someone noticed they haven't been paid they would contact Katie and she would send the money, but I am guessing if you didn't notice, you just didn't get paid. If you do some searches on GFY, you will see what I'm talking about.
Another reason that I know that they don't pay affiliates is
because I was one! When I originally joined the company they wanted me to send all of my traffic from my affiliate sites to them for free. I told them that there was no way in hell I was going to do that and I would just promote the competitors. So, they allowed me to be an affiliate, but getting my checks from them was always like pulling teeth.
Lastly, this didn't just apply to affiliates. There were many times when they just wouldn't deposit my salary. Sometimes I wouldn't notice until 2-3 payments.
Which leads me to this:
1. Katie is either the worst accountant in the world
2. Those guys are total crooks
So if you're asking me if I knew it was happening, I suspected by searching the threads on GFY and would always see affiliates complaining about missing payments and then all of a sudden the check would magically show up.
Again, this was me being stupid and naïve. Plus, there was so much money going around I didn't ask many questions about our financial status, but I never had our banking information, access to the accounting firm, and even had trouble getting my own payments both as an affiliate and a partner.
Things may have changed since they are with that other program, so I cannot comment, but I swear on my Jeff Hanneman guitar that every single word that you read above is true!
