Fraudulent Subscribers - Named and Shamed

Fellow Vendors,



If like me you have had subscribers not pay the money they owe you because of their credit card not being processed or by taking advantage of a free trial period and then avoiding payment at the last possible moment only to resubscribe later for a further free period or other such lowlife manoeuvers then I suggest we name and shame those responsible in an attempt to embarrass them and deter others from doing the same and finally put an end to this despicable practice.



I will start the ball rolling. Last month I had one of the best months ever in Broadsword Forex bouncing back from an unexpectedly large drawdown. One subscriber in particular began his subscription close to the low and would have enjoyed an incredible run. My current model is to only charge when profitable, which couldn’t be any fairer, and after a phenomenal run this scumbag can’t even give credit where it’s due and pay the monthly fee. To give him the benefit of the doubt I attempted to contact him privately in case it was an oversight but got no reply just as C2 hadn’t either.



Oded Rochman (oded_rochman@yahoo.com) consider yourself named and shamed.



If this person is currently subscribed to your system or attempts to in the near future be warned you will not receive any money from him and you should manually unsubscribe him to stop him getting another free ride.



I encourage anyone who has suffered in a similar manner at the hands of other parasites to expose them here also.

Prevention would be even better.



For the credit card problem, I wonder if it is possible for C2 to create some kind of intermediary account. It would work like this: The fee is charged to the credit card at the beginning of the month. But the money is not transferred to the vendor directly. Instead it is held at the intermediary account of C2. At the end of the month the fee is either refunded of transferred to the vendor, depending on the profitability. In this way it is guaranteed that the vendor is payed when the system is profitable.



There will be some administrative costs associated with this. I believe it would be accepable to deduct that from the refund. It would be even better to let the vendor pay for it, but this creates a similar problem if the vendor’s credit card would be empty.



For the free trial problem: I was going to write that C2 should limit the number of free trial periods to 1. But a subscriber can always make a new account. So this will not prevent all cases. OTOH it will make this kind of fraud a little harder, so I think it is the obvious thing to do.

Did you notice a person with the same name is an executive at Strategy Runner?



http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=51584

Yes I did notice that which makes it even worse given the resources potentially at his disposal, his actions are hardly a good advert for his company are they?

I agree prevention would be a much more desirable course of action but having consulted with Matthew and learnt that there is very little they can do about it I resorted to taking matters into my own hands.



As I understand it C2 currently does check the credit card details given when a subcriber first enrolls to ensure that it’s valid and can be charged at a later date. Beyond that there is little recourse against anything. Strictly speaking they’re doing nothing illegal, just highly unethical.

I consider credit cares as a necessary evil. I also new several vendors in the past, that would order entire courses or a couple of months service, and then challenge the charge on their credit card. (Such as, "that was not my charge, it must have been someone who stole my card). And they often won. Meanwhile, they got free service from the provider.