gaybucks.com - not paying, not responding

[TSGroup]

I would like to draw your attention to this story we have with gaybucks.com. We're advertising them for a pretty long period of time and now, after verifying the records I found that they NEVER sent a single check and now owe us about $2k (affiliate ID: syndicate).

Non of the e-mails was answered, so I tried over the phone. After few weeks I managed to talk to AJ, he said he will look into it and let me know. After few days I continued calling, but - no response. For almost 4 weeks now I'm trying to talk to him but both phones are leading to voice mail and no action at all.

I’m taking the ads down and hope that reading this HERE will help AJ to respond. So pity to see such a respected business to act this way...

TS Group

[thedevilcomes09]

that's not cool that they've done that to you, its a significant amount of advertising

[basschick]

did you try contacting chip? he usually gets things taken care of pretty darn quick.

[Jeff@UKSLads]

did you try contacting chip? he usually gets things taken care of pretty darn quick.

Yes, Chip is right on things like this. I can't see GayBucks purposely ignoring you like that. There must be some form of miscommunication.

[Lee]

No idea why but the first thing i thought of when i saw this thread was XOD.

Regards,

Lee

[gaybucks_chip]

I don't personally deal much with affiliates, but I will have AJ contact you immediately and address this.

I'm not sure what happened in this case, but AJ and I are reachable close to 24 hours a day and we certainly never go more than a day without returning a call.

[Lee]

I did check the IP just to make sure this wasnt a schill from another company and it didnt seem to match with any of our currently registered GWW Community members

Regards,

Lee

[gaybucks_chip]

Hmmm. This is rather concerning.

AJ was able to locate the information for this affiliate in NATS. S/he has been an affiliate since 2006, and some checks appear to have been paid (preliminary information) but the last two checks we sent were returned. (sent to an international address) and we did not receive a response when we emailed to inquire further (quite some time ago). The affiliate apparently recently updated his information and included a payment address in Foster City, CA. Our system requires W9 information for all payments made to US addresses, but we do not yet have W9 information for this affiliate, since until this address change, we showed this customer as being outside the US.

However, we cannot locate any tickets, open or closed, in our support ticket system associated with this company, nor do we have any open, unresolved, or unanswered tickets inquiring about any sort of non-receipt of payment from anyone.

The toll-free phone number on gaybucks.com rings to our main office line, which I answer, and I have had no calls or voicemails from *anyone* in the past 6 months relating to Gaybucks payment-related issues. AJ has not had any calls from anyone relating to this account; there was one call, 2 months ago, from a woman named Cindy who called and said "I've changed my address in your system, please send new payments there" but did not include any other contact information, a return phone number, an affiliate ID, or any other way to reach her.

We do have a handful of back-and-forth emails from the same email address as currently in Syndicate's affiliate profile, sent in March of 2008, inquiring about purchasing content from us. No mention in those emails of affiliate payments; we did not even know this person was an affiliate. If we had not been paying in over a year, this would have been a great time to bring that up, but it didn't happen.

AJ is contacting the individual at the email we have on file, and I am also willing to speak with him or her, by phone or email.

[TSGroup]

Lee, I really don't hang out on forums, so it is a no wonder. I'm here to get the responces I need. You can double check my e-mail I used to register here with the e-mail Chip has on file for affiliate "syndicate"

Chip, thank you for responding, at least something. I'm here not to talk shit about gaybucks but to get some responses finally. I know it's not nice when affiliates do this (I run two programs myself), but not taking care of the issue always comes to public one day. In my message to AJ's voice mail I did say that within few days will do this if you won't respond. Well, here I am.

I never got any check and non was sent - AJ did confirm me that over the phone.

The numbers I used are *****-4444 and ******-7351. And I did spoke to AJ, and hell no, I'm not Cindy. Or if I did sound like CINDY - please send me a little bit of the stuff you smoke together with the paycheck.

Yes, I updated the contact information in the profile EXACTLY when was talking with AJ over the phone - put my private e-mail address, so I can be easily contacted. NOTHING.

If you insist that the checks were ISSUED and CASHED then you should have copies for the paid ones, with marks from my bank. You can, post them here, but something tells me you won't. With W9 or anything else - nothing excuses your silince.

I'm sorry if I sound rude, but I hate when it gets to this excuse-wedidn'tdoit-talks. You didn't respond, you didn't send a single e-mail or check, you keep ignoring my calls. But here, on-line, for publicity you got all the information to prove I'm wrong.

[nickbaer]

it is embarrassing to be part of an industry with people who use this kind of language.

[Squirt]

They are in every industry :bunny:

it is embarrassing to be part of an industry with people who use this kind of language.

[freshgaypics]

it is embarrassing to be part of an industry with people who use this kind of language.

it is embarassing to be part of an industry with people who don't pay to affiliates.

[DEVELISH]

it is embarassing to be part of an industry with people who don't pay to affiliates.

there are more REAL non payments in construction - as a builder you just wait till the suppliers bottom up and you save quite some money ...

our industry has a good track record for paying affiliates! Chip as I learned and heared is a good respectfull and reliable guy.
Instead of posting here I'd pick up the phone and not try to find a person who I could blame but instead try to resolve whatever the issue is - it is so much more productive

DEVELISH

[Lee]

it is embarassing to be part of an industry with people who don't pay to affiliates.

Its more embarrasing to be part of an industry where people constantly jump to conclusions on the boards without knowing all the information, even more embarrasing when the information is posted as full disclosure and people STILL jump to the wrong conclusions.

Chip has said an address was changed, the last two payments were returned to them, they tried contacting the affiliate using the email address on file, heard nothing back.

Im not really seeing how this is GayBucks fault, they can only use the information provided to them to send payments out to the affiliate, if that info is wrong or incorrect, that is an affiliate issue, not a program owner issue, the affiliate should have made sure his information was correct, it isnt a program owners responsibility to make sure affiliates know their own address.... That would mean affiliates were stupid if a program owner had to double check each time an affiliate signed up that the affiliate actually knew where they lived or wanted to get payments sent to.

I get people signing up to Condom Cash all the time using information that is clearly incorrect, wrong urls, emails, even addresses. My guess is this is a simple error with the address on file when the affiliate changed it, nothing more, nothing less.

Regards,

Lee

[gaybucks_chip]

As I stated before, we always respond to an inquiry from an affiliate, whether by phone, email, ticket in our ticket system, PM on a message board, carrier pigeon, or any other form of communication.

All three of our business lines, as well as AJ's cell phone have detailed billing records. I went back four months on all four numbers and cannot find any incoming or outgoing international calls, other than to people we regularly talk to (designers, developers, etc). Nor do we have any unidentified calls from Foster City, CA (the current PO Box address). AJ checked his notes (we make notes for any affiliate inquiries by phone, since unlike emails, there's no written record to refer to) and we have no notes of any phone calls relating to any affiliate payment issues in the past 6 months. If these phonecalls had happened, we would have had records of calls from or to his (presumably international) phone number in our phone provider's detailed billing records, and in our phone log notes. Plus, AJ obviously would have taken his phone number so we could call him back with a resolution. But there are no notes or billing records. And anyone who has met or talked to AJ at a show knows that he has an exceptional memory... he can remember brief conversations from several years ago, and he is confident that he has never had a conversation with this affiliate (or anyone other than the message from "Cindy") regarding affiliate issues in the past several months. So we're left with no other explanation but that these phonecalls simply did not happen.

I also rechecked our ticket system, which is the only way listed on our affiliate site to contact us for affiliate issues. We have no open or closed tickets for anything remotely relating to this issue, or otherwise relating to this affiliate.

The only email address we have for this affiliate is the one that is currently in his NATS account, which is sponsors@qrmovies.com. AJ and I both checked all of our emails, and the only emails we have from this address, as I said before, are regarding the purchase of content from our CockyContent site, and there is no mention of anything related to affiliate sales in those emails.

The checks that were issued in payment on this account were sent quite some time ago (over 2 years). The statements where the checks would have been paid are in storage (which is why I said "preliminary" in the previous post), so we have requested the statement copies from the bank to see if the checks were actually cashed. We know that at least one check was returned for a bad address. In any case, any outstanding funds will be paid, but, as I stated above, we cannot make further payments on the account, since it now has a US address, until we receive a W9.

We will resolve this issue appropriately and get this affiliate paid whatever he is due, but since this affiliate seems focused on making it appear that we're non-responsive when that simply isn't the case, I don't think there's any point in trying to reason with him or further discuss this on a public forum. Further communications should take place in our ticket system at www.mrcsupport.com, so that we, as well as the affiliate, can have clear records of all communication.

Oh... and "freshgaypics" is signed up as a subaffiliate of TSGroup.