CPA Abuse?

Sorry for the public posting of this, as I’m sure you’d prefer for this stuff to be handled back channel, but it’s been weeks and weeks since I contacted you about this issue and I can’t get a response.

Can you please share how exactly you define CPA abuse and explain the rationale behind removing certain commissions without every notifying the affiliate or responding to their queries regarding the removal of said commissions?

Here’s my situation. I promote a variety of casino and poker sites, primarily though my blog. I also play a lot of poker and blackjack myself, including playing with a regular group of friends at a local poker home game. Most of them are active online gamblers, they read my blog, they know I’m an affiliate, and they’ll often sign up through my links to help me out. I don’t incentivize them, as they’re happy enough to help me out, especially since they’d likely sign up for the site anyway. Aside from any personal financial gain, it’s also very helpful for me to ensure that signups are being tracked as they should be, especially with programs that I haven’t previously worked with much before, so that I know what to expect before promoting them.

That said, in some cases we pretty directly discuss my affiliate arrangement in some cases, especially if there are wrinkles involved, such as with the Fortune CPA payment plan that requires two deposits for the CPA payment to be distributed. So, to paraphrase, I basically said to them, over beers and poker: “If you’re jonesing to play at some casinos, sign up with all those Fortune Lounge ones listed on my blog and make sure you deposit twice, so I get paid.”

This resulted in $2,000 in CPA commissions at Fortune Lounge. In each case the player deposited, received a sign-up bonus, wagered multiple thousands of dollars, made an additional, much smaller deposit, wagered a bit more, then cashed out.

On May 11, all of these commissions were removed from my account, flagged as CPA Abuse. I wasn’t informed of this and have yet to receive an explanation or definition of what exactly constitutes CPA Abuse, so that’s all the info I have to work with.

I can honestly see both sides of the issue. From Fortune’s perspective, yes, this is fishy looking, as a small number of players generated the signups, they made a second small token deposit when they still had funds in their account, then they quickly cashed out, never to return. They then repeated the process on other Fortune properties. Their actions were completely consistent with players who seemed to be aware of the CPA payment plan and structure and were acting in a way to ensure that the affiliate received the CPA payment.

From the affiliate point of view, though, I have a bit of a hard time defining what happened as “abuse”. Fortune set out the terms of the agreement for CPA payment and the terms were all met. The players are real, unique individuals. They deposited multiple times and wagered many thousands of dollars. All terms were fulfilled.

What bothers me most is that I can’t get a response of any sort from FA, either in regards to my personal situation or their general policy. This is fairly disturbing, especially in light of other recent policy changes. I’m beginning to wonder if the recent switch to offer a CPA payment plan was even in good faith, on their part, if they feel comfortable silently removing commissions from accounts based on “CPA abuse”, with no firther definition of what that consists of.

Like I said, sorry to post this publicly, but I can’t seem to get a response any other way. Looking forward to hearing the rationale behind moves such as this, as well as a clearly defined policy of what CPA abuse actually is. Thanks for your time.