ClickID, WinAffiliates, and marketing cost optimization

We kindly greet our dear audience and present to your attention a scam case involving Winaffiliates that cost ClickID Media 18,000 euros. We want you, our dear partners, not to get into a similar situation, so we are going to share all the details in this article.

Throughout 5 years of successful work in the iGaming market, we have met all sorts of “unique” advertisers, but such a big cut of budget disguised as a “marketing cost optimization” seems to be a well-thought-out innovation.

Well, let's move on to the point: timeline, parties' positions, decisions, conclusions. Enjoy the reading!

Start

We agreed to launch traffic in early February, for €90, for min dep without any KPIs.

06.02 we launched the traffic..

caling

Communication was going well, according to the manager and his platform, most of the advertiser's partners were satisfied with the traffic and there were no problems with scaling.

The screenshots show how Olga, the ClickID manager, periodically asks for feedback on each partner to control the quality of traffic. This went on until about the end of February.

During this period, we managed to connect 10+ partners and send 500+ FTDs.

Problems

26.02 Lyudmila stops all the traffic and adds her representative to the chat, who immediately offers us for a meeting.

Call Summary

1. Player Behavior

Representative states that 352 players have shown “suspicious activity”:

- minimum deposits

- minimum bets

- low engagement

Winaffiliates spends €90 per user, and they claim it will never pay off.

2. We are offered to change the terms post facto:

- baseline 20 EUR.

- traffic is considered fraud/motivated (Winaffiliates could not decide which one).

- Representative insists: “It is financially unprofitable for us to pay for traffic on CPA basis”.

The advertiser provides all its evidence of fraud/motivated traffic in one “informative” screenshot:

We agree on the details of the report and wait.

A few days later, we receive another report in words and a trivial stats upload without any evidence of fraud/motive (they don’t show the internal report on "marketing spend optimization"). We negotiate on the full payment for the traffic according to the previous agreements, referring to our reasoning (summarized below, shown in detail in the screenshots).

1. The advertiser is responsible for scaling the traffic, and if they are not satisfied with the traffic, they can stop the campaign at any time. As for our traffic, the advertiser liked all the flows and we have repeatedly negotiated about scaling up the volume.
2. Accusations of fraud/motive are groundless. Moreover, during long negotiations in the chat and 2 meetings, the advertiser failed to decide whether the traffic was motivated or fraud.
3. We sent traffic from 10+ different partners. According to the advertiser, they are all fraudsters. This is confirmed by their report where all the partners are labeled as fraudsters.
4. Ricardo openly says that he can't pay for all the traffic because his management doesn't allow him to do so.
5. The traffic is still active and the amount of deposits is already 39k euros with a CPA of 48k euros.

The second meeting was pointless, and we received standard replies to our company's official letters to Winaffiliates.

Results

Winaffiliates partially paid for the traffic. We received 29,250 euros out of the full payment of 48,000 euros.

ClickID Network disclosed the information of this case to the partners and covered the costs to the fullest extent possible.

We once again warn you about working with Winaffiliates and hope this incident will save your resources.