Hi All,
I totally understand everyone’s frustration and anger with regards to this issue, and rightly so. However, there have been major misunderstandings and confusion created by the actions of a few.
I would like to set the record straight with regards to all issues raised, in as much of a logical order as possible:
Villa Fortuna Launch
The official launch date for Villa Fortuna is 1 July 2008. As I have mentioned in my response to the original post by casinocrush, we did send out an invitation to a select number of NON-AFFILIATED players as a means to generate purchases and wagering. The license requirements imposed are different to that of any of the other casinos we have launched in the past. In order to have the Maltese license, we have had to, as a final requirement, generate purchases and wagers, which is then reviewed by the licensing board.
25 FREE Offer
The 25 free offer is not an openly offered promotion. If you refer to the Villa Fortuna website, you will see that this offer is not advertised on the website at all. The 25 free offer was used as a mechanism to get the invited players to test the casino, and to generate the necessary wagers and purchases.
Players referring players
I have done extensive checking to ensure my facts are straight on this issue. No casino within Grand Prive, nor Villa Fortuna, offers any Refer-A-Friend promotion or bonus. We have not requested nor instructed any player/s to refer their friends, family, etc. Nor have we made any players any offer/s to drive players to the casino. The player who is posting up on the forums is doing so with her own agenda in mind, and we have no idea what her agenda is.
It is for this reason that I requested all affiliates to please ensure that any references to Villa Fortuna are blocked or removed from their respective forums. I understand that this is work for you, but considering the levels of technology employed within most forum back-end coding these days, it would mean the inclusion of a rule that any reference to the words Villa Fortuna would result in these words being blocked out / replaced with characters that would make the post useless to anyone reading it.
Affiliate Program
Yes, a casino should launch with an affiliate program. And yes, that is what we intended and still do with regards to Villa Fortuna. We have been working on getting the Villa Fortuna Affiliate program running by 1 July. We went through quite a tough and problematic launch when we switched from ReferSpot to Grand Prive Affiliates, and I am sure you can understand that we were not looking for a repeat of that. As I have said in my previous response, the affiliate program is in final testing, and will be ready soon. I used 1 August as a date to ensure that we did not raise expectations, only to disappoint or not deliver. I am however confident at this point that the program will go live on 1 July, and hence me now committing to that date.
I hope that this now clarifies all the issues. I also hope that you believe me when I say that we had no, and will never have any, intention of negatively affecting our affiliates in any way.