As of 5:45 am CST this morning, my favorite GPT site (and biggest money-maker) shut down due to frauding members and advertising networks not paying them. I am devastated over this. SWATcash was by far the best GPT site on the internet with 90,000+ members. They stated they will do their best to pay members what they have coming to them as soon as they are able to. However, they won't be paying any bonuses received. This kinda hurts me, because I had $110 in bonus earnings coming and I guess I can just write that off. But I won't complain, because that site has been very good to me over the last year-and-a-half that I have been a member. I have earned over $3000 in cash and prizes.
I know that some of my readers signed up under me and in case you missed it, here is what SWAT Brian posted at the forum yesterday:
Due to all of the recent events I am sad to say that SWATcash will be shutting down effective December 1st, 2008. We will strive to do all we can to get payments out in a timely manner. Unfortunately if all goes well we will only be able to pay out Offer Earnings, Referral Commission, Shopping Earnings, and Click Earnings. With shutting down we have to end our contracts with the company that runs our servers which is really putting the strain on the company's wallet and possibly charging us more than we will have coming in, in which case we will have to file for bankruptcy. We hope that they will be glad to work with us and get that number down so we can payout all of the members who have made payout through December 1st.
We know this sucks, you don't have to tell me twice. We are still waiting on checks that are now almost 2 months late to us. I have been told recently that a check was over-nighted Wednesday only to find out today that it still hasn't even been sent. That is just how it has been going lately for us. We are doing everything in our power to get what is owed to us so we can get what is owed to you. We realize that this is a terrible time for this to happen as Christmas is just around the corner, but believe me that this is hurting us just as much as it is hurting you. A lot of you may think that we have a mound of money in the company that we are sitting on but the truth of the matter is, is that it's just not true. With paying to keep the site up, paying our employees the money is going down just as fast as it is coming in because every lead is being scrutinized more closely than ever and it is taking a longer time for payments to be processed. Now days all a advertiser has to do is say "I think we have some fraud here" whether it be one lead or 100 and your full payment is held till it is figured out which can take months.
Like I've answered before, "Why don't you have an emergency fund?", we did but it got taken out when we paid out in August and we later received word of fraud from the month of July and August. That's just how it goes in this industry and for a long time we took small hits here and there but never one this big. We always put the members first throughout this whole 2 year run that the company has been around and don't intend on changing now.
We really appreciated working with all of the truthful members that stuck around on the site and forums from the very beginning. Without you guys we would have never made it anywhere. The forums were always active and fun to be around and it truly made my job a little bit easier with all the helpful members answering questions when a mod or admin wasn’t around to answer them. I want to thank all the mods for doing a great job around here keeping the forums clean and informative. I’d love to thank Jeremy and Will for doing an excellent job keep the site new with cool features and making the site as unique as it was. Thanks to Soylagringaloca who did a great job handling support and making sure it was done in a timely manner and keeping it as upbeat as possible. And also thanks to SWATAP for providing us with pictures for visual representation of topics and posts. He kept the forums lively and bursting with activity. I hope I didn’t miss anyone but thanks to everyone involved with SWATcash it was like one giant family even though sometimes it got a bit out of hand.
The site will go down sometime tonight or tomorrow morning. I apologize for how everything went down and how this ended up, but I give you my word that we will try to payout members what they deserve and rightfully earned.
Goodbye and thanks for everything SWATcash. You will be missed.
