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Say what you want about Peter, but at least he answered emails. He may have not had good news but he DID answer. Carly on the other hand…
I hate to beat a dead horse but I have to make another point about these chargebacks. What really got me thinking that something shady was happening is, on May 31st, before the stats rolled over, my April stats had changed. Yes I said April. Instead of reflecting the actual negative balance (chargeback, minus my earnings) it showed just the chargeback with no earnings. On the next day June 1st I checked my May stats and they showed another chargeback for the same amount as April but it showed the April balance (the same exact figure as what showed in my April earnings). Then I went and looked at my April stats and they hadn’t changed since the day before. They showed a negative balance in the amount of the chargeback but no earnings. I had earnings in April.
Can we say red flags? I emailed them and didn’t hear from them for 3 days. In that time the April stats went back to what they should have been. You do the math.
So, back to how a player gets to chargeback $1700 in 2 consecutive months. They still haven’t had an answer for me. Oh wait they did answer that, these are quotes from emails from CC;
“We have conducted an examination here and it does seem that a negative commission has been rolled over incorrectly from April into May.”
“I contacted both the accounts department and the IT Department with your request. They were consistent in their response in that it is not the policy of Integrity Casinos to divuldge the financial transactions of players to 3rd parties.
They advise that just as they protect the privacy of your financial transactions, they also protect the privacy of players financial transactions.
They added that the $1,700 chargebacks received represents a liability extending back 6 months from the date the chargebacks were received by Integrity Casinos, and may not all have occured from the one player nor in the one month.”
The problem with the last part of the preceeding comment is that it WAS from one player. The chargebacks were attached to one player only and they were for April and May.
When I questioned them further about the inconsistancies in their comments the emails stopped.
I have talked to a banker about chargebacks and they can’t understand how a bank can uphold a dispute from a cardholder for the SAME amounts, in 2 consecutive months, to the SAME merchant.
Lot’s of questions, very few answers.
Quote: “I contacted both the accounts department and the IT Department with your request. They were consistent in their response in that it is not the policy of Integrity Casinos to divuldge the financial transactions of players to 3rd parties“
WTF does that mean? We pay for the traffic and the players – I hardly consider us affiliates as 3rd parties, and we have as much a right to see player transactions as the freakin casinos do. That’s a stinking pile of B.S.
I also send CC regular traffic – not much, but around 100 uniques a month, and I am not making any money from them, either.
:angry:
I can’t agree more Fergie. You bring up another beef I have had with CC. Do you know any other casinos that are so stingy with stats? Integrity only goes back a few months. Most casinos go back a couple years if not the life of your relationship with them.
Oh but I guess I shouldn’t complain, CC did adopt a policy of only showing stats for the 3 previous months. I raised hell with Peter when they adopted that policy.
They added that the $1,700 chargebacks received represents a liability extending back 6 months from the date the chargebacks were received by Integrity Casinos, and may not all have occured from the one player nor in the one month.”
They don’t have to give you player IDs, they can call them 1, 2 and 3 or whatever.
I would definitely want to see the breakdown of this.
Liability dating back 6 months, but only 3 months of stats? Huh?
I have asked the owner of the casino to look into these issues and respond.
As they are based in Australia it may not be until tomorrow before we get a response, so please bear with things until then.
Guys, Integrity Casinos has been a solid group to work with I am sure there will be a suitable solution to what’s being discussed.
It’s also important to note some of the things being brought up are from 2001 ummmm thats THREE YEARS AGO.
I have no idea why they are pertinent now or why they werent addressed BACK THEN. But if they weren’t fixed and there was concern about the honesty of the program why would you work with them for another three years?
Over the last four years the ONLY problem I ever had with Captain Cooks(and reported) were some winners at the end of a month. It happend twice in four years, so while it pissed me off when it occured I accepted that this is the nature of the business and people do win occasionally. If they didnt we wouldnt be able to convince people to play.
I earn good revenues with Integrity Casinos, they are listed at my sites and they pay me every month. Since they dont advertise with us here at CAP I have no reason to cover for them or embelish the truth…. In my opinion they are good folks.
Some feedback re my experience.
After sending a couple of, shall I say, demanding messages over the weekend I received a call this morning from Ginah at Integrity.
She has promised to look into my issues regarding conversions. Apparently there is currently a “technical review” underway to determine why conversions have dropped. When I tried to fish what they are reviewing I got nowhere.
Look, I’ve just had good experiences with them. Its only since the middle of last month that things got fishy. I am giving them the benefit of the doubt as they bothered to actually phone me and have promised to get back to me regarding this “investigation”.
I shall post here if I hear anything.
Red
PS Yes it also bugged the crap out of me from the start that I can’t see ID’s
Well, I just recently started to give them some exposure again – a 2nd try. I just had too many people playing the freebie amounts earlier. Other than that I had no probs.
3 months of stats seems not good to me though. I tend to like life time stats, or at least a year’s worth.
I am sure they are not crooks or I wouldn’t have put them back up for a test run – but this charge back thing does sound odd.
Most places will not show you player IDs. Some do. Focal Click does and it is one of the things I like about them – I can follow my players.
Professor, the reason I stayed with CC after having problems back in 01 is Peter. He was VERY responsive and promised to do his best to fix things.
I’ve been an affiliate of captain cooks since the day they launched. I remember being excited since the commission structure was similar to Casino Coins (the leader at the time) Initially I positioned them after the casino coins casinos but I quickly changed my mind on this and featured them.
While Casino Coins had historically being my largest earner at 35k in one month, I had to feature 4 casinos to earn that amount. Meanwhile I earned 20k in a month with captain cooks.
In my opinion Peter was a great affiliate manager. If I had a concern or needed a banner I would email him, and I would receive a lightning fast response. I was very sorry to see him go, and I wish they would have announced his departure instead of me finding out by having Carly respond. While Carly has always been friendly and courteous to my emails, I honestly dont feel she’s as knowledgeable of the industry as Peter is. I have therefore not been in contact with Integrity Casinos as much as I used to.
Regarding conversion rates. With Captain Cook’s I average 1 real player for every 15- 25 hits, and 1 real depositing player for every 50 hits or so. I have never experienced such as good conversion rate with any other casino. My results with Casino Kingdom have never been quite as good. My conversion rate is considerably less, I therefore focus all of my attention on Captain Cook’s.
I just logged in and this month I’m sitting at $4300, which is pretty good for the 7th of the month. I’ve been seeing earnings of over 10k a month for nearly a year now even after my traffic has dropped. My oldest active player has the player id 6694 while my newest players have the id 381541. So obviously players are not dissapearing from my account. I used to log into my account obcessively and look at the different player ids and I haven’t witnessed any discrepancies.
At one point in time I had a player make a huge win, I dont even remember what the amount was, and I didn’t even notice until Peter emailed me. He indicated they were going to give him bonuses and that the player retention team was working on getting him back. (the player had been a consistent whale for a while) it seemed like the player would never deposit the money again, but eventually he did, and he lost all of his winnings.
I’ve always been paid by Integrity Casinos, including for the competitions I’ve won. They also arranged an all expense paid trip for me to go to a trip to australia, and that went well. You can even read about my trip on the integrity casinos website. This trip was the best 2 weeks in life, so maybe I am biased because of it.
I personally haven’t witnessed more chargebacks on my account than what i viewed as normal from my experience with other casinos.
I’m probably not as quick to jump to theories about getting screwed by affiliate programs as some other affiliates here. I prefer to give a program the benefit of the doubt. I do have my suspicions about other programs including some of the more popular ones. But because I cant prove these suspicions I dont say anything.
Truth is my traffic to Captain Cook’s was nearly down to nothing at the end of 2001 and the beggining of 2002. I didn’t have any of my main websites operational, and i could not spend a dime on advertising. Throughout this period of time only 2 casinos did not experience a considerable drop in profits, and that was captain cooks and slot land. My earnings went down consistently month after month (as it should be as players moved on elsewhere and no new players were coming on board) but the decrease was around 10% a month. If they were to cheat me, I believe that this would have been the best time to do so, since I looked like one of those affiliates that had come and gone. My traffic has never fully recovered since then either.
I dont know what to say regarding the concerns brought up in this thread, but my experience with this program has been positive. I haven’t always agreed with some of the decisions made, but the honesty there is not something I question.
Antoine
Ok, I heard back from Geoff at Integrity Casinos and he wrote the following:
Thanks for the heads up on the issue Lagunacat raised on your forum board.
The situation is that one player of this affiliate in two months running charged back $1,700 each time (total $3,400). Thats a fact that we all have to live with.
We have been in discussion with the affiliate by email for about a week on the issue, and suspicion is something we find very difficult to disprove.
Gina from our affiliate team also tried to ring the affiliate on Monday, no-one was home. Gina left a message on their answering machine, asking the affiliate to email us with either a different number or a convenient time for them when we could catch them. The affiliate has not done so.
As for the stats changing claim – first we’ve heard of it. So we’ll address that issue with the affiliate when we are in touch by phone. Already scheduled is another phone contact attempt for later today (Wed).
Thanks for the update Professor.
The email discussions Geoff speaks of were with Carly and they were ongoing for much more than a week. My first email to them was on May 24. She basically told me they were chargebacks and there was nothing they could do about it. I had a lot of questions for her and got very few answers. At that point I requested a phone call from CC or IC because I was getting no where with the emails. I think it took me about 3 requests and 5 days for a phone call. Finally Gina did call and leave a message on Sunday. She did NOT ask me to email and provide more phone #’s or a better time to call. She simply said “I will give you a call later to see if your in, bye”.
So I waited. Monday and Tuesday nothing. Last night she called me on my cell phone. I had provided both my phone #’s to Carly in a June 1st email to Carly.
Geoff says that in the email discussions that “suspicion is something we find very difficult to disprove.” Well they haven’t offered any concrete explanation. All I have gotten from Carly was that a bank called in some chargebacks, misinformation, and a lot of ‘I don’t knows’.
I know this all sounds trivial but to me it is not. They are small facts but what most of what Geoff told you was full of inaccuracies. His note to you sounds very defensive. Why, am I not allowed to ask questions when these things happen?
As for my conversation with Gina last night. She didn’t have any new answers for me but promised to look into all of my concerns. She told me that they would try to ban the player from playing under my ID again. HUH? I asked if he was still allowed to play at CC. She told me she didn’t know.
More later.
Hi,
I totally respect opinions expressed here, especially the Prof’s and Antoine’s as I know them both to be experienced in our field.And I must admit that my issues with CC were very early-on but then as I had said in earlier posts, there was that problem with my income disappearing when the month’s changed over. That happened about 2 yrs ago.
When I did promote CCooks, I admit they did have fantastic conversion rates but were one of the worst programs when you looked at the bottom line at the end of the day.
As for Peter, ….. well he could dance all day with you and never say a thing. He must have taught before he left because his answers to my concerns (way back then) were almost exaclty as non-committed as the ones from CC that have been posted in this thread.
Peter will likely be President one day.
Just wanted to give an update on my travails with CCC and Integrity. Instead of beating my head against a wall in trying to explain this I am just going to place my recent stats in this post (I am leaving out Poker stats since I don’t push that program and thus are irrelavant). Maybe the professor or someone else can try and make sense of this.
~ This is my May payment report. (reflecting my share of the chargebacks ($1190) minus my earnings. ~
Payment Report May 1 2004 12:00AM
Total Commission- ($194.39)
Previous Balance -($579.71)
Brought Forward-($774.10)
Payment Due-$0.00
Amount Approved – $0.00~June 1st~
Payment Report- Jun 1 2004 12:00AM
Total Commission-$0.00
Previous Balance – ($774.10)
Brought Forward- ($774.10)
Payment Due-$0.00
Amount Approved-$0.00~ These are my earning for June. ~
Your Total Commission is broken down as follows :
Program – Captain Cooks Casino – Casino Revenue Share Model – 1- $95.55
Casino Revenue Share Model – 2 – $87.38 – Total $182.93
Program – Casino Kingdom – Casino Revenue Share Model – 1- $0.00
Casino Revenue Share Model – 2 – $50.98
Sub Total- $233.91
Affiliate Referral Commission – $7.00
Total- $240.91
~So as you can see I earned $240.91 in June. This is the payment report for July 1~
Payment Report- Jul 1 2004 12:00AM
Total Commission-$0.00
Previous Balance- ($774.10)
Brought Forward- ($774.10)
Payment Due-$0.00
Amount Approved$0.00Apparently I am not being credited with my earnings. So, even though I had earnings they are NOT being deducted from my negative balance. If I am missing something here then please help me out. Remember Voodoo Economics? I call this Voodoo Accounting.
You will recall in my earlier posts that I stated my numbers for May were very suspect ( second paragraph of this post= http://www.casinoaffiliateprograms.com/bb/showthread.php?s=&postid=15725#post15725 ). When I wrote to Capts. they were quickly changed. I expect these numbers I just posted for July will change again.
As for Integrity’s MANY promises to get back to me and explain how these chargebacks happened well that just has not happened. This is the last email I received on June 11 – ‘Dear Greg, Gina has asked those questions of the accounts department, as soon as we have an answer we’ll get it to you – promise.have a good weekend.Cheers Carly.’
Can we say lip service?The crazy thing about all of this is I am being charged$1190 (my share of the chargebacks) from this one player but my earnings from this one player equal a total of $859.07. This was from CC Flash for the month of Dec. 03 and Jan. 04. The first chargeback for $1700 was in April. The second for another $1700 in May. Still haven’t received an explanation for this.
So, are you watching your stats from Integrity?
Gregory
(yes that is my testimonial on the front page of Integrity’s web site. From a couple years ago)
With all due respect I would have to echo the Professor and
Antoine … CC was one of the first to understand the value and
power of honesty in this business … unlike may others
I don’t think CC would intentionally cheat an affiliate.
:rolleyes:
I’ll back them as well – I know them personally (and in fact was one of Antoine’s first sub-affiliates LOL). Honesty is one of their strong attributes – and speed used to be their best attribute but they have slowed down lately.
