Some advice needed urgently.

[Jon]

No you are quite right we rent a room out to her and share the amenities, we have given it the designation 10a to seperate out mail.

Unless you have actually setup a separate address properly (that would mean registering it with the land registry/local council & arranging for a solicitor to modify the deeds id guess to, then as far as Giveaway Network (and any company for that matter) 10 and 10a are the same address.

That aside, you admited to using the same wireless network to access the sites, which breaks another t+c about duplicate IP addresses.

While you did not go out to defraud the network, you did break a couple of their t+c which are there to protect them and their advertisers from fraud and abuse, rather than to find ways to make profit from you.

Different subject - create a flyer including your ref links (or a domain that lists them etc), offer to pay your customers £10 if they join and complete a offer, or offer them some form of reduction on the service you offer - assuming your not employed by someone and have to go by their prices etc

[rhysjones_1]

riight,m i havn't read all these posts(i quit after the saints's first one)
but in these cases, all other networks I've heard of just remove that refferal, nt ban the entire account, i agree this is very unfair, you weren't trying to break the rules, you made a support ticket telling them.

fair enough to remove that one referral(although i think it's just thy have no other way of spotting if someone has made account other than ip address's which is very annoying)

but the whole account if unfair, if you were purposely trying to flaunt the rules, you wouldn't have told them

was this however done on the same ip address?

[Haggisuk99]

Originally Posted by Jon

That aside, you admited to using the same wireless network to access the sites, which breaks another t+c about duplicate IP addresses.

We are not sure if she was on my network at the time she signed up. Her laptop connects to our wireless network from time to time though she herself uses a mobile dongle to connect. I have asked her since she says she cannot remember what she was using to connect so it is possible that she has.

It is unfair in my eyes. I can appreciate that the networks have to protect themselves against fraud, however this treatment is very harsh, I have read in this site a lot of complaints about this network doing this sort of thing. Seems to me that as they have 6 pending Lovefilms and 2 Greens out of me already that they are profiting from my misfortune and ignorance and have no intention of trying to sort out my account for me.

Noone has explained to me why you cannot have more than one account in an household, it seems to me that although it has been said that they do not want more than one household per advertiser that there are a lot of offers and whilst I am not interested in the book offer my wife would have been, so if she had her own account she may have taken up the offer of that as a refferal, this would then be making more money for the networks and as the advertiser now BOTH have a unique refferal where would be the harm?
I am still at a loss to why the rules are as they are maybe someone could explain to me why they are as they are?

[claire80]

The advertisers wont see it as 2 unique referrals to their company as they are the same address , they will assume that you are trying to take advantage of the free trial period etc and therefore will not pay the giveaway network commision .

[Haggisuk99]

Originally Posted by rhysjones_1

riig

was this however done on the same ip address?

We dont believe so. To be frank as my wife had pointed out if I hadnt have informed them they probably wouldnt have picked it up. Its been a case of Ive shot myself in the foot. Still in saying that at least I can sleep well at night now. Im just a bit gutted as I had 8 solid refferals with 2 green and 6 lovefilms pendings. Only needed another two greens.

[Haggisuk99]

Originally Posted by claire80

The advertisers wont see it as 2 unique referrals to their company as they are the same address , they will assume that you are trying to take advantage of the free trial period etc and therefore will not pay the giveaway network commision .

Hypothetically I had done the lovefilms trial, thats one unique offer, my lodger had done the coral thats two unique offers and my wife liked the look of the book offer, so that would be three unique offers from the same household. All the advertisers would have a new unique customer and the networks would be paid three times the amount.
So why cant you do it? To me that would make good business sense. I know that places like Lovefilms if you have completed the trial already then you cant have another free trial, so you cannot sign up more than once as one of my signups went to do the trial and his son had already done a trial from the lovefilm so it wouldnt let him.
Places like Coral expect each person in the household to have a seperate account as I could not use my lodgers account to bet from, that would be a breach of terms of coral as you have to verify yourself there with a passport or driving licence etc etc and vice versa, so again if someone could explain to me why a rule like this is in place

[claire80]

to the network it would look like you were referring yourself ie trying to cheat.
you would then potentially have 3 accounts who could all go on and get a ps3 for example .

[Ilikefree]

Originally Posted by claire80

to the network it would look like you were referring yourself ie trying to cheat.
you would then potentially have 3 accounts who could all go on and get a ps3 for example .

But wouldn't they still make money from the accounts?

[claire80]

Originally Posted by Ilikefree

But wouldn't they still make money from the accounts?

not if all the accounts went on to claim a gift they would make a loss

[Ilikefree]

Originally Posted by claire80

not if all the accounts went on to claim a gift they would make a loss

how?

[Haggisuk99]

But I can reset the account and go for another Ps3 anyway and as i have to have the same amount of refferals anyway so what would be the point? Sorry Claire I probably seem really dumb to you I just dont get it to be frank.

[Haggisuk99]

Originally Posted by claire80

not if all the accounts went on to claim a gift they would make a loss

I dont see how either, this is a typical viral pyramid scheme but what seems to be a substainable one, there isnt anyway that they can make a loss from it. Each refferal has to bring in 10 more paid ones before they need to send a gift out. They can maximise their profits by using a rule like this to negate having to send a gift out but they wont lose out from it.

[the_saint]

Does it matter why they have a one account per household rule? You are entering a contract, you read the terms and agreed to them. It's not (legally) an unfair or onerous term so why does it matter that they have it?

Like I said you read the T&C's so if you did not like this particular one why sign up? Every freebie site has the same rule so doesn't that indicate that it is pretty important to their business model and the way they are run?

[Tab]

Hi Haggisuk99

I've not had your ticket passed to me, so if you can PM the ticket ID I will take a look at it and your account.

Regarding the rules. These are in place to protect us and our advertisers. Whilst I can understand your thought process on this, and that you see these rules as unfair and illogical, they do in fact protect us from a LOT of fraud. Unfortunately you cannot look at this from an individual point of view, suggesting that if each member of a household completed a different offer, we are still gonna make our money and the advertisers are still getting a unique customer etc. This may seem correct, but doesn’t scale up to our entire user base. With the thousands of members signing up weekly trying to cheat the system, referring themselves, walking referrals through the process etc, it completely undermines the entire system and if allowed to continue will, in a very short space of time, cause us to loose money, lose our advertisers, and lose our legitimate users who will not be able to receive a gift because we will be out of pocket and out of advertisers. We will be bankrupt and closed if a very short amount of time.

These rules protect us from 99% of fraudulent users, unfortunately a small percentage may have a legitimate reason and not be trying to cheat the system, however there is no way for us at the time of verifying accounts to know who these people are. As I am sure you can appreciate, EVERYONE who gets put on hold raises a support ticket stating that they have done nothing wrong, made a mistake, wasn't trying to cheat the system etc... If we simply take them all at their word, then we might as well just not put people on hold in the first place and forget the rules altogether. This will lead to the situation I described in the second paragraph.

How our business model works, and the business model of every other reward site is no secret, and has been discussed many times before. We provide our advertisers with unique users, genuinely interested in trying out their services, and they pay us for this. We then reward our users for helping us do this with free gifts. It is not simply a free gift free for all. The advertisers expect a certain level from the leads we send them, and if the leads fall short and are of poor quality then the advertiser ceases to do business with us. These rules try and prevent that from happening on a large scale, and are applied to every user on our sites.

Also we do not make a profit when we send gifts out, we make a loss. 10 referrals for a PS3 in no way covers the cost of the item. We would need to be making at least £30 a referral for that to happen, which we're not. We make a profit on the members that give up and do not complete the sites and those that break the rules. That’s not to say that the rules are simply there to make us a profit, the rules are there so we can continue to giveaway free gifts, continue to run our business and continue our relationships with our advertisers. The fact is we would not have been running for as long as we have had we not had these rules in place, nor would any other network or reward site.

Now all that being said we do make exceptions. We have taken allot of users off hold and allowed them to continue on our sites. We are not as hard arsed as some people like to make out. However this is completely at our discretion and there is no hard and fast rule that says which users get taken off hold and which users don't. If there were it would be far too easy for people to get taken off hold by just repeating what the last guy that got taken off hold said. Therefore we look at every case individually and come to a conclusion based on the facts before us.

Sorry for the long post

Tab

[Haggisuk99]

No thank you for the long post, it is refreshing to read and I prefer the straight talk. You have been straighforward with regards your business model and that frankness has made me change my mind about you. For point of fact I have not been verified or even tried to verify. I am going for the console offer and have 6 pendings and 2 greens when I learnt that my lodger may have caused me problems on the account and at that point I sent in a trouble ticket. I will pm you the link and if you could look at it I would be most appreciated.

[Haggisuk99]

I would like to say thank you very much to Tab who has taken the time and trouble to look at my account and sort things out for me. A true gentleman.
Thank you Tab.