Some of you might remember this post announcing Brutally Honest’s relationship with Infolinks.
I received the following from a Jamie M. a couple of days ago:
Dear Rick,
We have detected fraudulent activities in your Infolinks Publisher account and your account has been permanently suspended.
We ask that you please remove the Infolinks code from your website at your earliest convience.
We wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.
Jamie M.
Account Executive
I attempted to find out more since I categorically deny engaging in any fraudulent activities, being completely surprised by the allegations made and received the following in reply early Thursday morning:
Dear Rick,
Thanks for getting back to me.
While checking your site, our QA team found that some of the clicks that were made on your account were not deemed legitimate by our system, meaning that they were probably not made by legitimate viewers. Our agreements with our advertisers do not enable these clicks to be counted and paid for. For obvious security reasons, we cannot disclose our fraud criteria or our fraud detection tools, however as a legitimate company who pays each month thousands of publishers, if we deem an account as fraudulent it is done after careful consideration.
Jamie M.
Account Executive
I responded Thursday evening with the following and have heard nothing since:
Jamie,
What about any outstanding balances that I had on my account (I can no longer sign in to see it… which is just fabulous)…
You have until COB (5 PM EST) tomorrow (Friday the 16th) to give me the decency of answering my questions…
Or I’ll publish a post and pass it along to as many of my uber blogger friends as possible, many of whom have linked to me before…
Your call sir…
I’m looking for some integrity here…
As God is my witness, I’ve not in any way attempted to defraud your company… not a single time…
I’m no longer sure that the reverse isn’t true…
Infolinks owes me money and I’d like to believe they’ll pay me any outstanding balances but I’ve not heard back from them, I can’t log in to see what that the balance of my account might’ve been and my last contact with the company was Thursday morning.
My advice to any and all out there is to be aware and to act accordingly.
Crossposted at Brutally Honest.
UPDATE: Earlier today, I received the following:
Dear Rick,
My name is Avigail and I’m the Customer Satisfaction Manager here at Infolinks.
First, I’d like to stress that here at Infolinks, we take great pride in the relationships we build with our publishers and I’m sorry to hear that ours has gone sour. I’d like to get back on track and would appreciate the opportunity to rectify the situation.
The truth is, we did see fraudulent activity on your account, there is no denying that, but in certain cases the fraudulent clicks are not at the direct fault of the publisher. If this is the case, please accept our apology.
In the meantime, I have reopened your account and we will pay you your outstanding balance. I hope this is a step in the right direction and would be grateful if you could update your readers.
Sincerely,
Avigail Nir
Customer Satisfaction Manager
T 212.201.7481
F 212.419.0975
W www.infolinks.com
Consider yourselves updated.
