AWE owes me 6400 USD
 

Dear fellow Webmasters,

I am not a newbie, been around in the industry for several years now. Some months ago I started out with AWEmpire. Now I wish I did not. I know that it's a TLDR post, but please read the full story carefully and post your opinions, no matter which side you support. I will also copy our emails, just to stick to the truth.

Here is the full story:

Last summer I have registered as a webmaster at AWE. When I signed up and started to deliver traffic, they have emailed me and inquired about my techniques. I gave them a clean insight: I was buying ads and have spent a lot. Here are the first two emails:

AWE:

(Hi, I am Andrea, blablabla)

"Please be so kind to reply this message and describe what way you send us traffic.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Kind regards

Andrea - AWE
Account Manager"

Me:

"Dear Andrea,

Basically I am buying traffic, as I intend to start hard SEO work later as soon as I develop real content to my website.
My main sources are 7Search, JuicyAds and Google display network, but currently I'm experimenting to reach the best ROI,
probably I'll try AdXpansion too.
Hit me up anytime if you need anything.

Regards,
Joseph"

After this, they wrote me another mail:

"Thank you for your prompt reply.
Your cooperation is highly appreciated.
Please do not hesitate to contact us again for any further question about our Adult Affiliate Program.

I wish you a wonderful day."

At this point I thought that this could be "a beginning of a beautiful friendship", as I started to grow through the ad networks with a decent ROI. Not a lottery prize, but well worth the effort. I earned around 120 USD in the first period, around 1000 in the second, then pushed traffic harder and went up to around 2000 during the recent months. I have spent around 50-60% of these earnings on advertising. My account was clean, everything went fine. Referer links proved my previous statements.

After a couple of months (after several successful payments made by them) I even got this email:

"Dear Affiliate,

I am Bence, an Affiliate Manager of AWEmpire.com, contacting you regarding a compensation we are about to make to your sales.
Due to a slight delay in the LiveJasmin.com to Jasmin.com transition a very few number of sales were not credited.

As a result of this you will receive an additional $5.798.

Thank you for your understanding. If there is anything that we can do for you please let us know."

Compensation. This is not really showing that my account could be involved in black-hat techniques or something. This showed me that I AM a respected webmaster, and I was happy (surely not about the 5 USD, but the way they treated me)

And then, all of a sudden I got this into my inbox:

"Dear Affiliate,

Your account has been terminated because of Terms of Use violation.
It has been reviewed by our Risk Department and your account is considered to be fraudulent.

Kind regards,
AWE Staff"

My answer:

"Dear support,

Excuse me, but what...? You told me that I have violated your terms, but did not give an explanation nor at least a warning, but terminated my account immediately. I have read the terms through, but found nothing unacceptable under my account. I do NOT consider this fair, please kindly explain, this is not how webmasters should be treated."

AWE replied:

"Dear Webmaster,

I am Stefanos, a Webmaster Support Representative of AWEmpire.com, contacting you regarding an investigation made by our Risk Management department.

Your account has been terminated for violating our Terms of Service.

It has been reviewed by our Risk Management Department and your account is considered to be fraudulent.

Therefore and according to our Terms of Service your payments will be withheld.

Your understanding is highly appreciated.

Best regards,

Stefanos Itounas (Steve)-AWE"

Wow, what an investigation, you are astonishing. But there IS more.
My turn:

"Dear support,

I am well aware what I did under my account, and NOTHING was against your terms and conditions. I buy traffic on several advertising networks legally, spent several thousands !!! of dollars delivering quality traffic to you.

I have found some chargebacks recently but that has nothing to do with me. This start to piss me off, since not even a warning or a mail came from your end, not even a tiny bit of communication, just shut my account down. Did I earn too much and you are not willing to pay or what? I would add that this email came a few days before the actual payment date, how surprising...

If you are not willing to communicate then I will have to seek legal advice, and post our conversation uncut to GFY and all other webmaster boards available as a fair warning to others. I do NOT need your so-called risk management methods nor any secret practices, only the REASON why you have banned me.

If you insist on keeping me banned then at least you should pay my pending payments, then we can consider this ridiculous case closed."

ANY human beings would reply something else, but AWE did this:

Dear Webmaster,

As mentioned in our previous communication, the decision has been brought in accordance with the guidelines set by the Management, it has been reviewed by a supervisor and is irreversible.

As stated in our Terms of Service, under Clause 6.2: "The Company shall have the right to deny, or withhold payment to the Applicant, and/or to terminate the Applicant's participation in the Program and these Terms of Service if the Company concludes that the Applicant has directly or indirectly engaged in, or encouraged fraudulent or misleading activity", and under Clause 5.2: "The Applicant further acknowledges and agrees that the Company has the right to immediately and without notice terminate the participation of the Applicant in the Program if the Company, at its sole and exclusive discretion, concludes that the Applicant uses any form of mass unsolicited electronic mail solicitations, news group postings, cookie stuffing marketing techniques, password selling or trading, warez, IRC posting or any other form of "spamming".

Your understanding is highly appreciated."

At this point I believed that they think that I have been doing cookie stuffing or spamming. But for God's sake... How the fuck would be my ratio around 1:100 if I did any of the above. I tried to explain it to them:

"My understanding? In what? Closing my account without communication, repeating messages like an autoreply-bot, or what? All right, let's make this clear. You say that my account could be involved in cookie stuffing or spamming, if I am right.

I NEVER used such techniques, if I did, my ratio would have been like.. 1:10000 or so... how dare you close an account without any proof?? I suppose you don't have any. My conscience is clear as I did not violate such terms (nor any) you mentioned. Just tagging me as a fraudster and not paying 6000 usd is the way to go.

Show me one (yes, ONE!!) referring url which proves this and I'll accept your decision. Or let this case reviewed by someone who at least understands the basics of affiliate marketing.

I'm not fucking around, consider this as a last warning. Pay my pending payments, or the next email will be an official one, police or law office, whoever acts quicker."

Another copy-paste email from them:

"Dear Webmaster,

I would like to inform you that we have acted according to our Terms of Service, which you accepted upon registration."

My reply:

"Thanks, that was a great help. Really, I could not expect more from the world leader of adult entertainment. Send the name I should include in the police report, as I will not give this up. Later I am contacting a law office too. You took my money without a proper reason and failed to prove anything, now you will have to defend your decision officially. Time to start gathering (or counterfeiting) evidence.

Also GFY posts will come along with the full story, I'll send you the link."

After this some copy-paste emails from them and me, then I wrote this when I was gone completely mad:

"This is all fucking shady, you never proved one thing, neither did you say why my account was banned. You never told me the exact reason. If I did something wrong, at least an affiliate manager should have contacted me. I have shown a clean insight into my traffic whenever you asked and was cooperative. Never did anything against your t&c, if I did, it was not my intention and still I am clueless...
But you lied to me all the time. You, gentlemen are a bunch of fucking incompetent idiots.
I thought we can arrange this somehow, but since you stole from me, and I have spent more than 3500 usd on advertising, you will pay for this. See you soon on GFY and the court."

And the last email from them:

"Dear Joseph,

I have to inform you that we have acted according to our Terms of Service that you accepted during the sign-up and we have also forwarded your message to our legal department due to the legal threat.

Best regards,

Stefanos Itounas (Steve)-AWE"

This is the whole story. Not all the emails, some AWE copy-pastes and my "why am I banned???" emails are left out. But I did not change a thing, AWE could confirm this,
I will send them the link to this post as soon as it's submitted.

Now, dear AWE, it's time to come out and play. As I have mentioned above: show me ONE thing that points to cookie stuffing, spamming, whatever you consider "fraudulent", and I'll go away in peace.

I suppose the thing is, that they don't want to pay tha last month (6400 USD) and I started to earn too much. I have also seen this kind of behaviour with other webmasters too.

Game on.
PROOF OR PAY.

Wow... long read - i'd like to see how this turns out. Might have been one big misunderstanding; i hope it gets resolved.

Pay the man!

This doesn't surprise me. Customer service isn't an AWE strong point.
I don't suppose your ads were pointing directly to livejasmin or one of there other sites were they?
Did your ads mislead in anyway?

that's fucked up , i hope you'll get paid.

They don't need a reason to term your account - That's the way the big companies operate now...

You are just one of the dozens of webmasters fucked over like this that have posted on GFY - Something needs to happen, I'm just not sure what it is.....

No, my ads were official AWE banners and display ads, pointing directly to livejasmin, no redirects, etc.. If they were misleading, they would not have been approved by the ad networks.

1:100, nobody gets a ratio like that and I mean nobody. Sounds really fishy to me.

Just go to AWE's website and check top50 webmasters list... Just to add: my account was in Revenue Share, not PayPerSignup. So the rebills are counted in the ratio, and I had people rebilling every day. Sot it's not only the signups. The signup ratio was worse of course.

:helpme :error

Well I do.

Lets hope you get paid

Damned AWE of all people
They do all kinds of tricky shit with the trackers and sometimes sales just don't count
I signed up to get the 100 bonus a few years back... sent some feeder and tgp traffic, got up to where I needed one more sale to clear a payout.. and no sales ever happened again no matter how much traffic I sent. Then I got some drunk guy I was drinking with to sign up this one time through my link, so I could clear the bonus and get a payout, and it never counted the sale at all.

"Awe, my balls"

Good luck man, hope you get this resolved.

Hitted the wrong button on this pool. You should definitely receive the money you've earned.

Sounds like only a bunch of motherfuckers left over at jasmin.com.

I would understand it they would do this on PPS, but rev share? Come one awe.

i was thinking the same

joco77
Join Date: Nov 2013
Posts: 3


You sound shady. And you're not telling the whole story.

Never had an issue with AWE, but this is said to hear.

I hope you get your cut, unless there is something you didn't share with us.

Good luck :thumbsup

When I used to do business with AWE, they would regularly wire me $5k-$10k for pre-paid sales.

I would soon believe them than some random guy with 2013 reg date and 3 posts.

We got shady people with 10,000 posts here in GFY :)

lets hear the other side of this story.

They have always paid me (prepaid only)
Let's hear their side of the story .

You are owed a very even number for a rev share account. I agree that they could have given you more detailled info on the nature of the ban.

Good luck on this problem,but is very hard to win .

Just a thought, but look and see if someone else is now buying the same ad spots you were using..and sending the traffic to them.

links pulled

he'll be surprised.
:1orglaugh

Probly jacking your whales and using your traffic sources.

That is the first thing I would suspect if someone asked me my traffic sources on a revshare program. I would only reply with something very general and if they don't like it then they can pay what they owe me after a hold period and I'll send the traffic to someone else. It's way too easy for companies to steal your traffic sources after you give them the information.

To be fair though this poster has no posting history here and his initial reply sounds a lot like something a black hat type scammer would say. Then again AWE isn't exactly the most ethical company either.

It would be a full retard move not to send bought traffic through your own page.

Are there really people this stupid?

there is a reason they are not paying. they are not stupid :2 cents: your new here :) see a few fraud cry babies this year not saying your one of them :1orglaugh :Oh crap

I'm just surprised they emailed you to inform you of their shaving, err "slight delay.". Also may be a typo but $5.798 doesn't look like $5 to me, more like $5,798 which would be more in line with companies shaving 50% or so of your actual sales.

Cookie stuffing is against ther TOS and cheats their system it affects all the hard working webmasters.

Not surprised at all. AWE has never been known for being webmaster-friendly. I can't believe this still keeps coming up.

you get what you promote

sorry for being a tit, but whats the site address?

mmmm looks like the drama isnt really kicking off yet.

i think you need to get paid. Your rebills are still coming in, so i am guessing they are taking your hard earned money.

If we based the verdict through reasoning the accused (affiliate) won the case, a big company who uses copy and paste support is useless and they cannot be called as big company.

Risk Management department MUST contact you if there is an investigation happened and not the support with copy paste we might not know if they are real or not.

AWE should pay you including amount which is not credited to your account.

sue them.

If they are showing no proof that you did anything wrong, and considering your story is exactly like you tell us, THEN they should pay you...

Otherwise this is setting a very shitty precedent over here.

This is how adult works now....

By the way he is not unknow or new, he is well known on the gay boards and owns some paysites. Think he is just new at GFY. If it is who I think it is, and he is not at all known as a scammer. Not all people live on GFY esspecially these days there is little reason to come here.

They did the same thing to me:

https://gfy.com/showthread.php?t=998027

... that thing about how people that get bad service tell at least 20 people? It's true.

My advice, sign up for Chaturbate Whitelabels, I'm making more money there then I ever did with AWE and it will surpass even VideoSecrets, which is a good company I just don't think they've kept their whitelabel templates up... my money with Chaturbate is has been snowballing. Sign up under my affiliate link please.

Of course

best of luck mate.

Cliff notes?