Crazy Affiliate Terms and Conditions

ThePOGG

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Given the thread on LeoVegas I though it'd be appropriate to highlight some of the other utterly insane terms I've seen in my reviewing travels recently:

- A term used widely across programs running on the Jumpman Gaming platform:

8.5 The Company or its designated appointee's measurements and calculations in relation to the number of players that were referred through your Affiliate account and the profits from players shall not be open to review or appeal. You acknowledge and agree that: (i) discrepancies may occur with respect to the calculation of the number of players referred through mobile devices, and you waive any or all claims against The Company or its designated appointee in this regard, and (ii) you will not be paid any payments with respect to blocked players or players that were not promptly verified in accordance with applicable regulatory requirements.

Mobile traffic represents nearly half of all traffic these days (maybe more - my figures could be out of date). They think that not being able to track mobile traffic accurately is something that could just be written off?



- Ikibu Affiliates

5.1 You will not send any marketing SMS, email or other communications relating to Ikibu or the Program without our prior written consent. In order for Ikibu to properly consider whether its consent shall be granted, you shall provide us with:

a) A complete list of the intended recipients of any proposed marketing campaign, which list we shall review to verify that marketing materials are not to be sent to any person who has a self-exclusion agreement in place with us;

So if you're going to engage in any email marketing you have to first hand over your full list of email subscribers. Forgetting the Data Protection issues involved in doing something like this, this sort of sharing of email lists has been hugely problematic over the years and represents a massive opportunity for abuse.

Simple solution though - no email marketing.


- Eshkol Affiliates

“Security Reserve

A rolling security reserve of 8% of all amounts due to you may be withheld for up to 6 months from the payment due date. The security reserve will serve to guarantee any debt or liability from you to us pursuant to this Agreement, such as in connection with Fraud, Chargebacks, Credits, etc.”

We're going to withhold 8% of your earnings just in case your dishonest or there's some problem that you could have no knowledge of - really?





These are just a few of the more dramatic examples that I've come across in the last few months. Plenty more out there for those who actually read the agreements.


TP
 
Casumo is Reviewed and Rated at Casinomeister:
Given the thread on LeoVegas I though it'd be appropriate to highlight some of the other utterly insane terms I've seen in my reviewing travels recently:

- A term used widely across programs running on the Jumpman Gaming platform:



Mobile traffic represents nearly half of all traffic these days (maybe more - my figures could be out of date). They think that not being able to track mobile traffic accurately is something that could just be written off?



- Ikibu Affiliates



So if you're going to engage in any email marketing you have to first hand over your full list of email subscribers. Forgetting the Data Protection issues involved in doing something like this, this sort of sharing of email lists has been hugely problematic over the years and represents a massive opportunity for abuse.

Simple solution though - no email marketing.


- Eshkol Affiliates



We're going to withhold 8% of your earnings just in case your dishonest or there's some problem that you could have no knowledge of - really?





These are just a few of the more dramatic examples that I've come across in the last few months. Plenty more out there for those who actually read the agreements.


TP

Thanks for sharing! As a writer, now-turned soon-to-be-affiliate, this kind of thing is invaluable. Thanks for posting, will veer on the side of caution with these affiliates I guess!

Alex
 
I actually have a bit of sympathy with Ikibu on this. The rules are clear that neither they, nor their agents, can send marketing material to self excluded players. An affiliate can't tell if a player is SE'd without access to the casinos list, but a casino can't check if the affiliate is sending to a SE'd player without access to his list. So sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place.

I had never heard of jumpman till a couple of days ago when I started getting spam for a couple of their casinos, trying to report it gave me a mailbox full message at the jumpman email address, and both casinos have completely ignored my emails. Support closes at 6pm too, wtf?
 
The operator are responsible for their mailing lists. Imo it's unlikely that they'd be raked over the coals by the UKGC for a mailing list that they have no knowledge of or control over. But the simple answer is as I suggest above (and as I strongly suspect is going to become par for the course in the near future) - no email marketing to UK players. Most mailing list services do allow you to isolate by geographic location of the sign-up. So you just don't send anything to UK players. Asking affiliate to cough up mailing list data, which let's be frank has been sold illegally time and time again down the years for big bucks, so that the operator can check your list against their SE list is asking for trouble. If we accepted this practice, how long before rogue operators started creating a master list of active players not in their own database that they could have 'an affiliate' send marketing material to?

And that doesn't cover whether affiliates actually have permission to do this in terms of the Data Protection Act which would depend entirely on the terms and conditions provided on each affiliate website and how accessible they were.

I'm not suggesting this was Ikibu's intention. In all honesty I like Ikibu and I think it was just a poorly considered term. But the potential for abuse if this was to become common practice is massive.

TP
 
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I agree with you, and I wouldn't give them my mailing list either, but I'm not sure the UKGC wouldn't get involved.

I had a coral affiliate spamming me 3-4 times a day around 18 months ago. At the time I was self excluded. So after being ignored by coral, and telling them as I was self excluded it was up to them to stop their affiliate, being ignored again, I rang the UKGC. I was told, if I was SE'd then I shouldn't get a single marketing email from Coral or anyone promoting them. She took some details, and less than 48 hours later got a phone call from a senior member of staff at Coral, apologising massively, emails stopped from that day, and not had one since.

Now it might be because I had made coral aware of the spam alongside me being se'd, but whatever it was the UKGC obviously got in touch with Coral and that made them move their arses.
 
I agree with you, and I wouldn't give them my mailing list either, but I'm not sure the UKGC wouldn't get involved.

I had a coral affiliate spamming me 3-4 times a day around 18 months ago. At the time I was self excluded. So after being ignored by coral, and telling them as I was self excluded it was up to them to stop their affiliate, being ignored again, I rang the UKGC. I was told, if I was SE'd then I shouldn't get a single marketing email from Coral or anyone promoting them. She took some details, and less than 48 hours later got a phone call from a senior member of staff at Coral, apologising massively, emails stopped from that day, and not had one since.

Now it might be because I had made coral aware of the spam alongside me being se'd, but whatever it was the UKGC obviously got in touch with Coral and that made them move their arses.

I understand what you're saying. And in your situation the UKGC were absolutely right to step in. The key statement here is "So after being ignored by coral". If you've informed the operator about this and they've taken no action they are in breach in two ways:

1) They are allowing their affiliate to continue sending promotional mails to a SE player that they are aware of

and

2) presumably you tried the unsubscribe button and that didn't work, again another violation by the affiliate.

Where these sorts of issues come up operators ARE going to be expected to take action immediately where they become aware of them. I doubt operators are going to start receiving warning on issues they were not aware of unless there's significant evidence to suggest that they're 'turning a blind eye' on a larger scale or dragging their heels in dealing with reported issues.

The easier way to do what Ikibu are trying to would be for them to provide a list of email addresses that affiliates are NOT allowed to market to. But that carries its own data protection issues, these lists change daily if not hourly so it's never possible to catch everyone, it would be a MASSIVE time sink if every affiliate program starts doing this and you KNOW some a-hole affiliate will use the list for marketing other brands to.

This is a can of worms. I'm not convinced that either party would have sufficient permission to share a list like that, but the ICO would really need to make a ruling on that front. There's no point in putting in a term to remain compliant on one front only to break other laws if it's applied.

As stated at the start, if an affiliate program is really worried about this - and in their position I would be - the solution is simple, don't allow your affs to email/sms market to the UK. You're going to lose some revenue, but you're going to protect yourself from a LOT of potential risk in the process.

TP
 
As stated at the start, if an affiliate program is really worried about this - and in their position I would be - the solution is simple, don't allow your affs to email/sms market to the UK. You're going to lose some revenue, but you're going to protect yourself from a LOT of potential risk in the process.

TP

Yes totally agree, Casumo have already done that, and I think someone else have, but can't recall who. I don't do any email or sms marketing so I tend to skip over that part of things :)
 
There is a super simple solution to this, once the UKGC has their central database up and running. They should offer a way that an affiliate/casino to run a search with name, surname or email address or similar to find out if somebody is SE'ed. Result should be just "YES" with a list of casinos/operators or "NO". Could take it further, that the UKGC is offering an auto-sync function like we do with Outlook etc. That way, no casino/affiliate is passing around sensitive data files.



I understand what you're saying. And in your situation the UKGC were absolutely right to step in. The key statement here is "So after being ignored by coral". If you've informed the operator about this and they've taken no action they are in breach in two ways:

1) They are allowing their affiliate to continue sending promotional mails to a SE player that they are aware of

and

2) presumably you tried the unsubscribe button and that didn't work, again another violation by the affiliate.

Where these sorts of issues come up operators ARE going to be expected to take action immediately where they become aware of them. I doubt operators are going to start receiving warning on issues they were not aware of unless there's significant evidence to suggest that they're 'turning a blind eye' on a larger scale or dragging their heels in dealing with reported issues.

The easier way to do what Ikibu are trying to would be for them to provide a list of email addresses that affiliates are NOT allowed to market to. But that carries its own data protection issues, these lists change daily if not hourly so it's never possible to catch everyone, it would be a MASSIVE time sink if every affiliate program starts doing this and you KNOW some a-hole affiliate will use the list for marketing other brands to.

This is a can of worms. I'm not convinced that either party would have sufficient permission to share a list like that, but the ICO would really need to make a ruling on that front. There's no point in putting in a term to remain compliant on one front only to break other laws if it's applied.

As stated at the start, if an affiliate program is really worried about this - and in their position I would be - the solution is simple, don't allow your affs to email/sms market to the UK. You're going to lose some revenue, but you're going to protect yourself from a LOT of potential risk in the process.

TP
 
Your problem with that is abuse. Any method of sharing player information allows for abuse. So I'm running a nice clear UK focused site and I do some email marketing, using the UKGC tool to ensure that I don't send emails to SE UK players. But I'm also running some shady site that continues to advertise unlicensed rogue operators to UK players. I now have a confirmed list of compulsive gamblers to target with my dodgy operation. It's located in some nowhere state that simply doesn't care. It's next to impossible for the UKGC or ASA to touch unless they can find a paper trail back to something in the UK.

Data sharing in this industry and especially related to problem gamblers is such a sensitive issue that the basic truth is that it's likely easier to just close this all down than try and find a workaround that wouldn't allow for abuse.

TP
 
Your problem with that is abuse. Any method of sharing player information allows for abuse. So I'm running a nice clear UK focused site and I do some email marketing, using the UKGC tool to ensure that I don't send emails to SE UK players. But I'm also running some shady site that continues to advertise unlicensed rogue operators to UK players. I now have a confirmed list of compulsive gamblers to target with my dodgy operation. It's located in some nowhere state that simply doesn't care. It's next to impossible for the UKGC or ASA to touch unless they can find a paper trail back to something in the UK.

Data sharing in this industry and especially related to problem gamblers is such a sensitive issue that the basic truth is that it's likely easier to just close this all down than try and find a workaround that wouldn't allow for abuse.

TP

You are right, I shot too fast with my post. Best is then, no marketing email/sms from affiliates.
 
Here's another classic from Amazing.Casino Affiliates:

"We reserve the right to withhold payment for backdated affiliate commissions. We will not pay invoices received for commission earned during any period more than 90 days prior to the receipt of the invoice. We reserve the right to hold affiliate commission, should any traffic sent not adhere to any our terms and conditions, for any fraudulent activity or chargebacks. "

This combines with a minimum payment threshold of £500 to mean that any affiliate that does not generate £500 in rev in a 3 month period is getting nothing.....

TP
 
One question that arose at the Malta Conference a while back was what would happen if a UKGC excluded player was running and affiliate site?

If he/she was banned from gambling, could they affiliate?

Another point brought by a member here on PM was what would happen if someone deliberately self exlcluded another person? I mean my name and employment history is readily available along with electrol roll info with DOB / address etc

Another example.. if someone hated a streamer on Twitch, could they not piss them off by banning them from every casino for life?
 
It would be a minor issue if the affiliate program paid via player account, but most operators have the facility to set accounts to 'withdrawal only'.

As to malicious use of the SE system, that's something that can and will happen if it's not properly thought through.

TP
 
I didn't realise any programs had only to player account, I get paid by a few to them, but the option is there for bank transfer or skrill if needed. Obviously if I SE'd I would change to a different method
 
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