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I see HippoJo launched. I received about 50 emails last night telling me about it – about 10 to each of 5 email addresses I had never given them, or even used! It looks like they visited each site in my Sig here and ripped out the email address as one of those sites is only linked in my CAP sig being a test site.
Not impressed!
HippoJo’s Management has been around since dinosaurs walked the earth. They started over 30 different online casinos in the past and I have little doubts they retained affiliate and player contact info from all of them. While its possible they crawled our site I think its more likely they had your email addys from elsewhere.
They are set to come onboard here at CAP and are just now going through our due dilligence process. I will talk with them and let them know that spamming isnt a good way to endear themselves to potential new affiliates.
I got a shitload too. I think a bunch of them were tech challenged – they only had partial content.
Maybe someone messing around trying to get a mail out?
Professor wrote:While its possible they crawled our site I think its more likely they had your email addys from elsewhere.I can live with the multi-email thing – I understand technical glitches happen
But there’s no way they had my [email protected] email address – I’ve never used it for any affiliate program as it’s just an SEO test site.Off topic a bit from Simmo’s original issue — but does anyone know if the Hippo Jo management is the same team that ran the Integrity Casinos group (Captain Cooks etc) into the ground before Rewards took it over? Hopefully not. Or, if it is the same people, hopefully they won’t make the same mistakes again.
No. HippoJo did help start up Captain Cooks, but it was owned and managed by Tom and Maryann Dick from iSpye.
Though they ran into financial difficulties at the end Captain Cooks was one of the BEST Microgaming casinos in the old days. I earned hundreds of thousands of dollars with them over the years and really liked Tom and Maryann.
Thanks for the info Prof.
They ran inchilli into the ground as well
I think it’s important that we be very clear that Tom Dick owned Captain Cooks and Maryann Dick (his wife) owned ISpye, the marketing company behind the casino. Tom Dick sold Captain Cooks a couple years back to Jamie Taylor (Casino Rewards). There has been evidence that there is a very definite connection between Tom Dick and Inchili Casino.
As far as the ownership of HippoJo, Tom Dick’s former right-hand and Maryann Dick’s right-hand are the owners. The HippoJo owners broke ties (in a not-so-friendly manner) immediately following the sale of Captain Cooks. The owners of HippoJo have been around since the start of the industry and are as straight up as they come. I know they’ve had some rough roads in getting the new casino up and running and I suspect they have a few employees who need to learn a bit more about the right and wrong way to do things. I’d imagine things will clean themselves up at HJ, swiftly.
Thanks for clearing that up.
Thanks Debbie for the clear up I have given them a shot so we shall see howit goes.:hattip:
Follow-up…
I just spoke with one of the HippoJo owners and asked her if she knew there was an email issue. She was unaware of this, so she went straight to her Aff Manager, who explained that she culled the internet to develop a list of affiliates to send an email to. Rather than email each affiliate individually, she put this list together and gave it to the tech to send the piece out as a bulk emailing. This is where the problem came in. The tech responded with the following:
We have written our own mass email routines and our test only used one channel of a possible 256 to send emails out through. So our tests looked fine. Then we sent the main email out, and the guys allocated 15 channels to sending the emails. Instead of the total number of emails being divided up across the 15 channels, every email went out through each of the 15 channels – hence they received 15 copies
So there you have it. As suspected, it was no more than a mistake and management is now aware of this and no doubt scrambling to rectify and prevent future incidents.
Thanks for the info GG. Tech cockups are acceptable IMO – God knows I’ve made some like that in the past
“Culling the Internet” (trawling?) for emails and then mass emailing that list isn’t though. It is simply spamming. Not exactly an “opt-in”.
Besides, if they were aiming for accreditation here, they’d have access to the affiliates anyway via the forum if they waited. Nice people or not, that’s the bit that winds me up and it worries me that they don’t understand the concept of ethical marketing.
I kept this post private as I am always willing to cut slack to new operations while they find their feet, but if they spam like this, it won’t be long before someone posts publically and that could, justifiably in this instance, hurt them early.
Lou: I think it’s worth pointing this out to them in the Accreditation process (if it doesn’t address this already), if only for their own future benefit.
