F'ing Ripped off by email company - Advice about what I can do??

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cornerstone33

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Feb 12, 2008
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Ok, I'm a friggin idiot. I needed to run some traffic at a biz opp offer and I put out a request at emailresults.com (a directory service like buyerzone) and hooked up with a company that called me back. (don't want to mention who just yet, b/c the "email" just went out today and I'm still evaluating)

Long story short I wired $1300 for an email campaign that included 6000 click throughs. Guy said all the right things, I asked if it was incentivized, if these were real emails going out etc, etc. Sounded like the real deal, but obviously I did not do my homework.

Well, we are now 1186 "clickthroughs" in and I have exactly 1 opt in to a form that takes name, email, phone. This is to a page that we have tested and gets 10% on the low end and 25% conversion on the high.

So... basically I got scammed for crap traffic and I'm an idiot. I can accept that. Tomorrow I'm going through and exercise of futility to try to get some funds back. I want to have some ammo going in though and that's why I'm posting here...

What kind of recourse and/or retribution can I put into play? Any ideas? I don't want to threaten the guy, but that is basically what I will be doing and I'd like there to be some kind of downside if we don't work something out. You guys around here are pretty devious so i though you might have some good ideas!
 


I hate to admit it, but something similar happened to me. I stuck the collection agency on her ass.

Dealing with some of these small guys is really hard. Who's to say what real traffic is. Just because more didn't sign up doesn't mean they didn't live up to their contract. In order to get any money you're going to have to go to small claims court and prove your case which would be very hard.

Other option is to call them out on affiliate boards like this and let everyone know your exact stats." I paid $1,300, got 1,186 clicks, and 1 signup". If you do this make sure you stick to the facts or else they can come back to you on it for making false claims and slandering their name.

While I'm not a lawyer obviously, I'd think you could do some PPC on their company name, and give your review of them. If they see that, they might be willing to settle. However you have to be careful about this so its not extortion. Might be worth talking to a lawyer for 30 min.
 
Is there anything in your stats that doesn't look right (aside from the conversion rate) Like: Are the IPs all from the same netblock/general location? Same browser/header info? Length of time between clickthroughs, etc?

If you have a lot of stats from your previous tests, you may be able to put those logs against the logs from this campaign. If they sent crap traffic, there should be something in the logs (again, aside from the conversion rate) that stick out like a sore thumb.

You may not have a legal case against them, but you might have enough to call them on it and make them look bad.
 
If you paid them by credit card, just call your CC company and tell them you didn't get what you paid for and demand you get your money back...pretty simple.
 
Ask for test emails, get your email seeded with their database and ask them the source of the data. If they don't give you at least one example of their source, don't trust them. Paying on a performance is always another option.

I've found a lot of CPM mailers tend to work CPM's because they know their traffic is garbage. Exceptions exist I guess. But I've rarely had a good experience with a CPM buy.

In your case, it's hard to tell if that was even email traffic...
 
thanks

Thanks guys for the input. nickycakes- I would feel better now if i would have just sent it to you.

I was thinking about doing up a little review style site/case study and then doing seo to rank for the guy's name and company name. Should be pretty easy to rank first in google. Not sure about running adwords because that bastard will probably have some ad clicking scheme to just ream me out of more $$.
 
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