What To Do When An Affiliate Manager Untags Your Players
Affiliates recently learned of fraudulent behavior at C-Planet where players were being untagged from affiliate accounts. Unfortunately, this unscrupulous practice is something affiliates need to guard against. Here’s what to know about how to track and deal with the headache-inducing scenario of affiliate managers untagging players from your account.
Monitor Suspicious Activity
The folks at Casinomeister originally assumed that when all player activity at C-Planet came to a halt it was because no one wanted to play there anymore. However, after a C-Planet rep started a thread on their forums which generated multiple responses from active players, they became suspicious. Casinomeister contacted forum members to determine they were still active on accounts at C-Planet created through their affiliate links.
Here are some tactics and warning signs for determining if an affiliate program is untagging your players:
- substantial player activity diminishes to nothing
- build and maintain relationships with loyal players
- have a trusted friend keep a test account at sites to track affiliate program integrity
- question affiliate managers regarding suspicious changes to account
- maintain presence on gambling affiliate forums to monitor industry trends
Speak Up
If you have reason to be suspicious of an affiliate program, don’t be afraid to speak up. It’s better to perform some due diligence and find out you were wrong than continue to advertise for a rogue affiliate program that is stealing revenues from you.
Once you are certain an affiliate program has gone rogue and is untagging players from you, there is an industry counting on you to kick and scream like a child on a temper tantrum. Well, not literally. But that’s a much better approach than remaining mum.
As an iGaming affiliate, you are a player in a larger industry whether it always feels like it or not. There is a responsibility on all affiliates to do their part by creating objective reviews of gaming sites and reporting rogue activity to the community at-large.
The iGaming industry must collaborate to send a loud message to affiliate programs that practices like untagging players is completely unacceptable. There are a few ways to deal with this behavior:
- post on forums providing full evidence to support your claim (include screenshots, call logs, and anything else that legitimizes your assertion)
- update your reviews and gaming testimonials with the new information you have about the site
- stop sending players to the site (remove all affiliate links)
- call to action other iGaming affiliates to create community cohesion in blacklisting the rogue program
The extent to which affiliate programs will attempt to get away with shady practices is directly related to how careful gaming affiliates keep an eye on their revenues and the industry as a whole. Do your part to prevent untagging of players by making it clear to affiliate programs that such behavior will go noticed.
Are You Prepared to Profit 
You should really look into EverestAffiliates.com in this matter, about 3 months ago, over night, I lost 75% of the revenues from my players sent mostly to Everestpoker.com and has remained on those levels since. Have anyone else seen this pattern as well?
Johan, I’d encourage you to post about this in the forums where more people are likely to see your comment. Everest has been on the decline lately and there have been some questionable issues with one of their sister programs, Expekt. The Everest Poker Network has lost a substantial percentage of its traffic over the past 12-18 months.
One should really do test on programs that just have a few casinos and programs that have a reputation to show deposits only for a few months and last but not least a high number of closed accounts. I personally had a lot of closed accounts at Brightshare.
The actions and solutions listed above, while good advice, are not strong enough.
If an affiliate manager is untagging players from your account, it not merely “unacceptable”, as mentioned above. It is ILLEGAL! What these rogues are doing is stealing. Plain and simple. And stealing is a punishable offense. More needs to be done than simply kicking and screaming about it on forums. More needs to be done that merely having some small group of affiliates blacklist the offending company. Actual legal action needs to be taken. If an investigation proves that stealing is indeed taking place, those responsible for it can be sent away to spend some time where they belong: behind bars and/or receive a severe financial penalty. I’m afraid that only this type of legal action taken against these thieves will make a difference.
I appreciate the suggestions in this posting. There is always great advice and information on the Casino Affiliates Program website. But I just feel that much stronger action must be taken to stop these rogue affiliate programs for continuing these abhorrent practices! Thieves must be brought to justice.
Thanks for listening.
Yes, c planet are a real problem, they have owed me money for a very long time and the affiliate manager listed will not even reply when we e mail him to ask about this payment. We did take their banners down a long time ago due to this.
Perhaps the next e mail I send them will let them know that we will discuss this on the forums but they seem to already be getting publicity anyhow and may be numb to this.
The Gambler,
You are correct in being as outraged as you are the notion of affiliate managers untagging players. Not to suggest that legal action shouldn’t be taken, but there are problems with it. It’s very expensive, requires considerable organization, and there are often jurisdiction headaches since iGaming sites are rarely located in the same nation where an affiliate is doing business. I’m guessing that most affiliates affected by player untagging issues haven’t lost enough revenues over it to justify going through the huge process of suing them. In situations where this isn’t the case, then legal action should certainly be weighed as an option.
There is a lot of power in affiliates coming together as a community to blacklist rogue sites. It might not lead directly to being compensated for lost revenues like legal action could, but it can dissuade other affiliate programs from attempting the practice which in the end saves everyone. I would guess that most affiliate programs are more afraid of their name being drug through the mud across the affiliate community than they are of possible legal action. One is immediately and irreversibly damaging. The other can be fought or evaded through jurisdictional means, etc.
In summary, “kicking and screaming on forums” should not be foregone for the sake of taking legal action.
Unless there is really big money involved, or you have money to throw away, the only real winners in a lawsuit are the attorneys. Suing for ‘principles sake’ may give you a ‘nice warm fuzzy feeling’ in the beginning. But after 6 months or so of continued aggravation you will doubt your sanity. And that is true if the parties are in the same city much less a different country.
I’m all for continuing the black-listing process. Oftentimes there is a large sum of money involved. How about a class action suit? If enough affiliates are getting screwed, and it seems pretty clear that malfeasance can be proven, I think it would be a great asset to affiliates if we had some sort of consortium where we can band together in strength and solidarity, and file a class action suit where appropriate.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks for the message! Luckily our forum is a great resource when you can chat with other affiliates about programs that untag. If it’s a real, legitimate concern, CAP will then label the program as rogue. Check out our list of programs that are rogue here: http://www.casinoaffiliateprograms.com/glossary/rogue-casino-/-rogue-programs.php