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4 Ways Operators Swindle Affiliates in iGaming
Affiliate marketing in all industries is built on trust, especially when it comes to the iGaming industry. However, there are many unfortunate situations in which some operators are entirely unfair with their partners. There are many reasons for this swindling, and many ways to do it as well.
All affiliates, specifically those who are just starting out in the iGaming scene, need to understand the risks associated with working alongside some operators. Many crooked operators are also notorious for offering attractive and large payments to affiliates, but end up lowering them as time goes on. Today we will share with you some of the popular methods adopted by swindler-operators.
Let’s look into some of the most prominent ways iGaming operators deceive their affiliate partners:
Affiliate Shaving via Admin Fees
An admin fee, put simply, is the fee that the operator deducts in % in order to make up for its direct costs, such as the cost of payment systems, payments for software providers, and in the case of white label casinos, royalty. The percentage here can vary greatly from one casino to another, mainly depending on the geographical region in which the casino is located.Exactly how affiliates get cheated here is by a simple trick. Besides all the genuine fees that are mentioned in T&C and other relevant pages, swindler casinos deduct fixed percentage from NGR before providing data to affiliate platform. In a common case of 30% from NGR where NGR is equal to GGR minus software fee, deposit costs, bonuses, the swindler casino adds ie. 25% admin fee on the final NGR and sends it over to the affiliate system. Casino and Sportsbook affiliates end up receiving 22.5% instead of 30%. There are some forums where “iGaming detectives”, by some test registrations and wagering, bring to light the actual RS percentage of casino and sportsbook operators.Affiliates should always be careful of such tricks and make sure to keep track of the percentage being deducted as often as possible, checking in on statistics daily.
Deactivating Cookies
A surprising amount of people don’t know how cookies even work, or what they do. A cookie is a piece of data which is kept on your computer by the browser you are using. In an affiliate’s case, if someone visited the online casino site through the affiliate link, then their tracking code is automatically saved as a cookie on the browser. Whether or not they register through the link at that moment, if they do not delete the history (specifically the cookies), it will still be set under the potential player. There has actually been a case of fraud before related to cookies, when an online casino was exposed for having broken cookies that don’t function. Now, it is actually relatively easier to get away with this type of fraud, since once people remove the tail of the link or don’t register instantly, they will most likely not be registering through the affiliate link anymore. Back to the swindler online casino, an affiliate of theirs noticed that there might be some fraud involved and demanded verification, where it was determined that it was worse than they had imagined. It came about that over 90% of players had been lost, meaning that the affiliates did not acquire this profit. They closed off the case by citing a technical difficulty, and fixed up the cookies.
Killing players
Another dangerous and almost undetectable way of swindling affiliates is the so called ”Killing Players”. What it does is cut off players from affiliates. The affiliate brings a player to the online casino, and after some time the player stops wagering anymore, or at least that’s what the affiliate sees in the system…As an example, a certain player brought in by the affiliate is of high value, and the casino is supposed to pay the affiliate’s commission in % from the revenue the player is bringing into the casino. Since the player is of a high value and seems to be loyal to the casino, the unfair operator decides to cease paying RS commission to affiliate and “kills” the player by simply detaching the player from its affiliate. This method often targets the bigger players, for they are much more valuable, and the most common argument once they are caught is a technical error, as we have seen previously with the cookies.Affiliates should make sure to keep an eye out for the sudden dissolution of their most valuable players!
Cross-Marketing Fraud
Cross marketing has been around for a long time, and it is when two firms come together in an alliance to boost each other’s sales and advertise a brand across various channels. The way that it is used in this case is a little different than what it normally is like. To put this as simply as possible, let’s use some examples. Long story short – the operator runs newsletter or SMS campaigns targeting players of one of their brands and talks them into registering at their second casino in order to get a fantastic amount of free-spins, bonuses alongside with many other benefits. As a rule, the second website is more charming and has a much better look than the first one but system-wise, the platform is the same, so that players can get used to the latter rather smoothly. In essence, the affiliate is being shaved, but in practice there is no way to rebuke the operator for what they are doing, since there is no evidence (albeit some cases) of them making use of internal data to beckon players to another brand.This has become a large concern since the operators and software providers have access to the highly-valued player’s contacts, as well as details on their gambling behavior, which makes it easier for them to persuade the player into switching to a different casino in general. Through this method, some swindler-operators save a significant amount of money. All the affiliate has here is trust, which can’t always take you a long way. They won’t have any idea what is going on, especially since they do not have much information on the player anyway, making the affiliates very vulnerable to this trick.
As we can see, there are quite many tricky ways that deceptive operators may use to swindle their partners. It is absolutely necessary for all affiliates to be 100% sure that the operator they are working with is reliable and trustworthy. It is also important to not fall for scam or fraudulent programs, which often include extremely high commission rates, and are almost always untrue.
In order to partner up with decent operators we recommend you to check out the Best Operators page where we have summoned trustworthy operators alongside their offers in iGaming Affiliate Offers page.
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