Cake Poker Affiliates - Big Problem

[ptg]

We're a long time poker affiliate since 2004. We've been affiliated with Cake Poker since May 2008. In September 2009, we acquired 19 players. According to the online reporting, all of these players made a sufficient deposit of $50 to $600, played well over a thousand raked hands each, and generated well over $100 in net rake. As far as we were concerned, they were all legitimate players.

We ended up spending over $1700 in acquiring these players. We were on a hybrid plan with them, and they ended up paying us about $2100 in commissions for the month, in early October. Nothing out of the ordinary.

In mid October, about a month later, Cake came back to us saying that these players were fraudulent players and they wanted their money back. Even though I did not think that it was our fault for not detecting these fraudulent players sooner, I asked them if we could come to compromise because I didn't think that we should be held entirely responsible for the fraudulent players. We were defrauded as well.

Then, they came back to us and said that they had already paid "over $1,700 in chargebacks" and that was more than enough of a compromise, basically giving us no real alternative. They did give us an option to repay the money with future earnings.

I didn't feel as though this was a good compromise since we would still be short about $2000 in the end. At that time, I stopped promoting Cake Poker until we were able to get the situation resolved.

Fast forward to last week. They completely locked our affiliate account (we had 56 players on the hybrid/revenue share plan still generating revenues), and we had an outstanding balance of $300 in our player account. Then, they went to the other Cake Network sites that we're affiliated with and asked them to terminate our relationship with them.

I'm not sure what else to do, so I'm asking other affiliates what they think of this situation? My problem is this...let's say if 2 months down the road, they come back to us again and wanted us to repay them for 20 fraudulent players from last year. Where does it stop? As an affiliate, we can only do so much to prevent fraudulent players, but ultimately it is the site's responsibility to detect these fraudulent players within a meaningful amount of time. I can't imagine if this kind of thing happened to a rakeback affiliate, working on slim margins.

Please share your thoughts. Ultimately, I would like to open a dialogue with Cake Poker affiliates, but they are not responding to my inquiries. I even gave them a deadline to respond by Wednesday. Now they are closing all of my players accounts, taking all of the money in them, and contacting all of the other Cake affiliate networks telling them to end our affiliation with them. I don't think that this is right.

[Student]

try gamblingaffiliatesunion.org

[Chalkie]

Thanks Student, you beat me to it!

Yes by all means come over to us Gambling Affiliates Union join and give us as much info as you have.

I will make sure that we enter into discussion with them for you and help as much as possible.

[ptg]

Why can't you help me out here?

[Chalkie]

Oh LOL

Only offered, i do apologise.

Here you will get many offers of advice and maybe thats what you want, at the GAU we will attempt to speak with them for you, putting your case forward and hopefully not being ignored as you are at present.

[ptg]

alright, I just filled out the contact form with the above.

[NickM]

How did you spend $1700 acquiring these players? Were you incentive marketing? Is it only a coincidence that you spent $1700 acquiring these players and that lead to $1700 in chargebacks or are the numbers related?

[ptg]

No, those two numbers are not related. Yes, we are in incentivized marketing, but that is not a bad thing, so long as you know what you're doing.

[Ridge]

Well hard to give input w/o knowing the full history. I'm sure Cake won't bother to respond here either. I would imagine the 1700 you spent has a lot to do with some of the issues, incentive marketing is always risky in this business. Cake overall is a good room and many of us has dealt with them for years and they seem honest. Sometimes bad things just happen to good affiliates.

I think GAU may be your best bet and I hope this thread will stay updated as to how this all gets resolved

[PTC]

If you read the T & C carefully, you'll see they can basically do whatever they want to you. I've said this many times here; all of the T & C for these programs are set up so that virtually every affiliate is in violation. You have no recourse and your agreement can be terminated at any time. If you don't like it, don't accept these agreements. You would be surprised what kind of deals you can find if you are providing some value. I have my own little set of T & C and if anyone violates it, their site gets replaced by one of the other spammers who is waiting for a spot. With the exception of 2-3 websites, these programs are all replaceable.

When I build pages now, I use PHP coding for the name of the website in all spots, 301 redirects for links. When it comes time to throw somebody off, I change 2 coding elements and wouldn't you know it... the best site for omaha poker is no longer rpm,,, it is now some other piece of shit site that coughed up the money for the ad spot.