The Revenue Discrepancies: Why I Left Webpower Inc./iFriends
I was asked, in a recent blog comment: “What made you look into your 10% reserve account and ask Webpower/Ifriends for a statement of your revenues after all those years?”. There is no simple answer, so here it is.
In november of 2009, I went to check my online earnings report to see what I had coming to me in the week ahead, as I do every week. According to my pay statement, I had nothing coming to me. My next cheque was at nil. Concerned that there was an error, I phoned iFriends to let them know my pay stats was reflecting no earnings. This is when they informed me that I owed them money due to refunds.
Below, is what showed up in my refunds list (the “V_0000017………” sequences are the specific number assigned to the member, whose handles are MACADOO1983 and TROLLYMAN).
(MACADOO1983) Total refunded: $98.57
V_000001791939 11/07/09 $ 13.48
V_000001791939 11/07/09 $ 4.49
V_000001791939 11/07/09 $ 4.49
V_000001791939 11/07/09 $ 4.49
V_000001791939 11/07/09 $ 22.46
V_000001791939 11/07/09 $ 7.49
V_000001791939 11/07/09 $ 6.74
V_000001791939 11/07/09 $ 4.99
V_000001791939 11/07/09 $ 29.94
(TROLLYMAN). Total refunded: $736.71
V_000001703833 10/28/09 $ 132.49
V_000001703833 10/28/09 $ 38.18
V_000001703833 10/28/09 $ 47.16
V_000001703833 10/24/09 $ 226.80
V_000001703833 10/24/09 $ 53.89
V_000001703833 10/12/09 $ 3.58
V_000001703833 10/12/09 $ 5.38
V_000001703833 10/09/09 $ 36.82
V_000001703833 10/09/09 $ 95.53
V_000001703833 10/09/09 $ 59.20
V_000001703833 10/08/09 $ 37.68
Needless to say, I was pissed to find out that I owed them money for services I performed, which tiFriends told me were actually members “frauding the system”. I was not involved in this scam, so why was money deducted from me? I performed the service (so well, in fact, that they returned on multiple occasions). An e-mail response came to me from Webpower Inc./iFriends.
With regards to TROLLYMAN, this was not simply an instance of a customer
service representative making nice with a complaining viewer. This was an
instance of what we call “true knowledge fraud,” where a customer uses valid
information on the iFriends service without the intent to actually pay for
their usage.We received a call from the bank on the customer’s behalf, and the bank
advised that the customer indicated this was fraud. The bank sided with the
customer in this instance, despite our ability to provide evidence to the
contrary. Our hands, in effect, were tied with regards to the refunds that
were issued to the customer.As you know, online transactions are very easy for customers to dispute,
especially when the merchant is an adult merchant. In order to maintain our
ability to process transactions, there are very strict guidelines as to what
can and cannot be contested on our end with the bank. This was a situation
where the customer took advantage of the system, and his misusage impacted
not only you, but several other video hosts as well as iFriends itself.We have made the decision to issue you a bonus based on the TROLLYMAN usage
to cover what he spent in your sessions. Our VCH support team had actually
already started looking into this matter when they saw the refund
adjustments come through. This bonus is being applied to your reserve
balance for the full amount of the customer’s usage with you in your
session.I would appreciate if you would maintain the confidentiality of our
discussions on this user, as this is not information that would normally
have been shared. The customer *is* still protected under our privacy
policy, even if he has defrauded us. I would also appreciate if you would
maintain the confidentiality of the outcome of this situation.
I responded:
About the reserves – how will I be able to track this now, to know
the balance of what’s in my reserves, since you do not furnish us with
this information? As far as I’m concerned, this money has not been
issued back to me, it’s sitting in your account, collecting interest
and the next time some jackoff like TRIOLLYMAN decides to screw me,
it’s automatically taken off. It benefits iFriends more to have the
money sitting in there than to simply return it to me and treat it
like revenue I, in fact worked for. I do not often get refunds. This
is not common for viewers to complain about something I have done
wrong in a session. If anything, it is the direct result of problems
with the site. You can see this clearly by reading my user reviews. I
want my money from those sessions. I don;t know how much longer I can
work on iFriends with all this going on, and from what I have wrote to
you about, which all still remains unsolved.I am becoming more and more leery about working on iFriends now.
Knowing that, at any time, any amount of money can be deducted from me
with no proof of why. An explanation if I kick up a stink, but no
solid proof. This is not right. I’m sure you’d want proof of why money
was taken from what you earned. What if I owed you money but deducted
money without any explanation to you? You have to ask every single
time about deductions because I refuse to tell you anything except
that the money was deducted from Joeblow69 on the 5th of september?
Why doesn’t iFriends furnish us with this information? Furthermore,
the link to e-mail the fans from our member list in the fan club
disappears when their account becomes inactive. Why on earth would you
do that? You should let us contact them to see what was wrong and
possibly to get them back. There’s already a thing in place so that we
can’t spam when sending out e-mails. It just looks like iFriends is
hiding something, regardless if this is true or not.
Webpower Inc./iFriends responded:
I believe that when you forward along an e-mail that has attachments, the attachments from the original e-mail are not preserved. That was the problem with these attachments. You forwarded me an e-mail that cited attachments, but they did not get passed along by your email client.
I am checking your IDCard from the inside and outside connections. I do not see QQQQQQQQQQ or JRZOOOOOOO. I only see handles that are seem to have been created by you for your IDCard. Again, can you send me a screenshot of what you are seeing? They do come through on the original e-mails, just not when you forward an e-mail that has an attachment.
As for TROLLYMAN, as I explained to you previously, this is a situation that is considered “True Knowledge Fraud.” I am sorry that I apparently did not explain this situation clear enough. This was an instance where the user committed “True Knowledge Fraud,” and his bank backed him up on it. Sometimes, given the nature of the service provided by our site, banks are more likely to simply side with their customer, rather than review the documentation that the merchant has that would prove the legitimacy of the transactions. Banks, especially in this economy, would rather have a customer who pays their bills monthly than do something that will cause an otherwise good customer of theirs to take their business elsewhere.
There’s no way to know when a user signs up and uses the site using valid, legitimate information that he will then turn around and charge back everything with the bank, or that the bank will honor the chargebacks after speaking with our customer service department. A chargeback is a refund for bank purposes, as the amount is still refunded back through our payment processors. The only difference is that WebPower absorbs the fees attached by the bank. Banks do charge fees per chargeback transaction, so each of those refunds you observed was also accompanied by a per-transaction fee (sometimes up to $30 per transaction) that we pay. This fee is not passed along to video hosts.
In this instance, after careful review of the situation with our billing department, we’ve taken additional steps to make it easier to spotlight those users who have the potential to be “True Knowledge Fraud”-sters, fine-tuning some of the procedures we already have in place to catch some users before they are able to spend large sums of money in pay sessions on iFriends. If only the Psychic Hotlines of the ‘80’s could be employed to catch such customers!
Thank you for the suggestion you have offered! I will pass it along, but would also suggest that you use the “Help Us Improve This Feature” link to send it directly through to our development queue as well. While I do have the ear of our staff, when the input comes to us via the “Help Us Improve This Feature” directly from video hosts like yourself, they tend to get reviewed and potentially implemented much quicker.
I responded:
Thanks for clarifying that. Attached are 2 screenshots of what I’m
seeing in my ID Card settings page. I know what page you were looking
at but need you to click on the AMANDA36CISME link from that page,
which will take you right to the page with all those strange
characters I mentioned.And the e-mail address on top of the page – I already changed that
back to amanda36c_@hotmail.com a couple of weeks ago, from
jaime@webpower.com. Somehow, it keeps reverting back to jaime.
Hopefully it sticks this time.Also, someone noted that TROLLYMAN may have signed up again under
TROLLEYMAN this time. Just a heads-up.There was a $280.00 reserve adjustment added to my latest cheque. What
is it for? It doesn’t match up with any of my records.
When cross-referencing these reports with the information derived from the online reports I have, I started to notice major discrepancies. Strange things were happening in my fan club, as well. Jaime (an employee of the company, whose job was ‘chathost support’) had her e-mail address, on a few separate occasions, kept replacing mine in my settings. She had trouble offering any believable explanation for the TROLLEYMAN/TROLLYMAN concern I had. Webpower Inc./iFriends’ response:
Thanks for the screenshots! That certainly is making it easier to track
this down. I’m working to get these purged out, as they were from the
original iFriendsV2 testing and should no longer be on your account.As for the head’s up, I’ve double-checked and triple-checked the TROLLEYMAN
account and do not see that he is linked to the TROLLYMAN account from
before. Usage is inconsistent (heck, it’s even a different country) and
from what I’m seeing, the new TROLLEYMAN is not the old TROLLYMAN.VCH Support advises me that the $280 was a reimbursement for what was
previously deducted from the reserve account for the TROLLYMAN refunds. It
had been done before we issued the bonus to your payouts, so this was the
final adjustment.And, as requested, attached is a spreadsheet that shows what we have in your
reserves, and the checks associated with those figures. I hope this answers
the questions you have regarding what’s currently in the reserve. If not,
please let me know any specific questions you have based on this report and
I’d be happy to address them.
The information contained in that spreadsheet didn’t match up with any of the information I had access to online in my revenue stats. The rest is all on Ripoffreport.com
http://www.ripoffreport.com/adult-web-site/1-800-ifriends-ifrie/1-800-ifriends-ifriends-webpo-c9a5f.htm
ElliotNess29 and 
amanda36c 
ElliotNess29 9:59 pm on March 19, 2012 Permalink |
Wow, you were smart enough to see through their games and leave from their site when you did.
Webpower/Ifriends were clearly lying and taking advantage of you as well as the other video hosts for many years. After reading your blog, I am now more sure than ever that every one attached to the companies of Webpower/Ifriends should not only be investigated but put in jail if found to have knowledge of this fraud.
This 10% reserve account was 10% revenue money taken from your weekly revenue and returned to you six months later, less any deduction for whatever refunds/chargebacks (which you had could see on your own refund list on their site?). Webpower/Ifriends never gave any of the video hosts a monthly account statement of all the transactions for 10% reserve account from the start of the deductions from your revenue? Nobody asked why there wasn’t a statement? What company deducts money from people that work for them on a weekly basis but never once gave them any kind of statement of accounts. I don’t even want to do the math on this number of 10% revenue withdrawn weekly for 6 months, held to make interest and any amount can be given back or not at all with no questions allowed to be asked, because the amount has to be staggeringly large.
Let’s see if I get this straight: Webpower/Ifriends takes all your revenue amounts for Trollyman and MacAdoo away from you because they received a chargeback from the customer’s bank for fraud even though the site has proof that all the information is that of the cardholder and he has to have knowledge of the fraud. Webpower/Ifriends never contacts you about the withdrawal of your paycheck but when you call them, you are told that you now owe the site money. When you email your company contact with Webpower/Ifriends, a different story comes out to you that it is “true knowledge fraud” and their VCH support were already investigating the fraud and refund adjustments. They go on to inform you that the amounts for Trolleyman taken from you would be put back into your reserve account as a bonus and to keep it confidential. Why were other video hosts who were affected by this customer fraud not compensated for it because they didn’t complain? You emailed your contact back to complain about this treatment and you are told a whole story about how Webpower/Ifriends can’t do anything about this kind of fraud and that the videohosts were lucky that the possible up to $30 charged for all chargebacks weren’t also deducted from you. So how did Trollyman and MacAdoo spent that much money, sometimes multiple times on the same day for quite some time without raising RED FLAGS in the payments dept. of Webpower/Ifriends? They fail to see this as a potential fraud or problem but only investigate it after the fact not during the transactions themselves? It seems to me the site was at fault not any video hosts who were just doing their job while expecting the site to do their due diligence. There are so many holes in this fraud that it only leaves more questions.
There are just so many questions that I would love for you to answer for me if you can. Here they all are about just this episode:
-Did Webpower/Ifriends always take refunds/chargebacks from the videohosts during your time working on their site? Did Webpower/Ifriends ever explain any of the refunds/chargebacks taken from your revenues?
-What was the $280 extra amount for and what happen to the MacAdoo refund amounts as you don’t mention anything about it so then why is it even there at the top of your blog?
How many times was your email address in your account settings changed to this Jaime@webpower.com and what was this email account for? Why would they change your email address for testing and not put it back? What was the explanation for your email address being changed?
-In your ripoff report file, you don’t ever explain or showed Webpower/Ifriends’ explanation as to why your revenue statements which was only available for a short period of time in your account on their site. Why were these accounts not archived for you to look back on at any time?Why were they all confidential information only when you ask for them all and showed no personnal customer information, according to you? Why did they need to speak only to your lawyer and did they ever even attempt to send you the confidentiality agreement only without the statements they had prepared for you?
Thank you for answering my question with a blog as I had no idea it would require such a bizarre answer. I hope my new questions aren’t annoying to you.
Thanks for your honesty.
ElliotNess29
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amanda36c 3:15 pm on March 20, 2012 Permalink |
To answer your questions:
No, in the beginning, they absorbed the chargebacks/refunds. Their excuse to hand them down to us came as the result of an apparent overwhelming number of people trying to fraud them with friends and their credit cards.
No, they never explained anything to us, with regards to those accounts or the transactions/balances, unless we specifically asked about it. Who is going to ask about every single refund? They seemed to be getting worse and worse and at one point, became too numerous to even keep track of, let alone, inquire about, one by one. All I can say about that is, when I asked, I got the standard answer “it was a true-knowledge fraud” – whatever the hell that is supposed to mean! The member truly knew he was frauding the system? Or is it that iFriends knew about it and let it continue? Look how long this supposed member TROLLEYMAN got away with this! Yes, there certainly was some ‘true knowledge’ there. I only found out about all those sessions charging back, that day I was told I owed iFriends money!
The answer (of course, her version passed down from VCH Support) was:
“VCH Support advises me that the $280 was a reimbursement for what was
previously deducted from the reserve account for the TROLLYMAN refunds. It
had been done before we issued the bonus to your payouts, so this was the
final adjustment.”
This is the whole problem – amounts never added up! Nothing was reconsilable with these figures I was given. My very reason for inquiring about seeing more. That’s when they clammed up, lawyered up and refused to give me a report of my 10% reserve account. Yes, they held back 10% from me, never showed me a damn thing about the balance of that acct, nor the transactions. When I asked for a report, they gave me one but I found a ton of deiscrpancies, things just not adding up with my own records, the ones they give me online. Nothing was adding up. So, I have no clue as to what happened to Macad00. Can’t make heads or tails of anything. Look at the answers I was getting. The revenue reports they showed me were an afterthought. I needed to see more. They refused to let me.
I don’t know how many times my e-mail was changed to Jaime’s but on the few occasions I returned to that page, (cookies cleared and all), it kept reverting back to jaime@webpower.com
This was in my account settings. Had my name, with all my information, my screennames. Noone was supposed to have access to this, except myself. Other odd things happened in there. Under the list of screennames I used, were entered a bunch of weird names that were not my screennames. I told her about that but she claimed she could not reproduce it and wanted me to send her a screenshot of what I was seeing. I did and apparently, they were using my account settings page as some sort of ‘testing’ platform. Why my page? Don’t they have a whole (active) site to tinker with? Why test with my settings? They used me an awful lot for tersting purposes. I never clued in as to why. Was it only me, or did they use others as well? My fan club was just as bad and I think was used for many test-level projects of theirs.
They only allowed us access to reports dating back 10 weeks. Anything beyond that (going back further), you would have to request a report for. I’m not sure if they would even give it to you, but I suppose one can try. Strangely, the 10% is held for much longer than that; 6 months. Not adding up in my mind, but heck, maybe that’s just because I like to actually look at my revenues. When I am given that privelege. You know? It’s convenient to know what kind of paycheck you have coming to you. Us little chathosts must be so lucky to be given such ‘confidential’ information. 😉 Those reports weren’t just confidentail when we asked for them, they were confidential all along, before we asked, as well as after we asked. I asked why, when it contained absolutely NO personal information on the member, why I wasn’t shown this and they never did offer a response for that. Just ignored that question, even though I repeatedly asked it. They had no control in the Ripoffreport.com forums over what I stated, nor did they even attempt to resolve anything there with me. They made a very vague, general statement, to acknowledge that they saw my complaint and then ran off, never to be heard from again. Claimed my statements were “unfounded”, but then when I came back and posted a screenshot to back up what I was saying, well, they were burnt. What can you say when someone posts a screenshot, proving you a liar?
They wanted to send my lawyer the confidentiality agreement to look over and then have me sign it. They refused to give me that statement of my 10% reserves without my signature on that ‘confidentiality agreement’ first. I didn’t have the money to lawyer up and somehow, I think they knew that. If I did, this would have gotten really ugly.
I hope this answers most of your questions. I chose to jot this all down very quickly, in order to get all the facts down in this elongated version of what I’m trying to cram into a ‘nutshell’. 😉
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ElliotNess29 3:18 pm on March 23, 2012 Permalink
It answered some of my questions but it just brought a whole lot more questions which just seems to be the norm when dealing with Webpower/Ifriends, like their other 430 complaints on Ripoff Report.
So if I have this right Webpower/Ifriends which is owned by Ex-wall Street analyst, Allan E Hadhazy who also has a computer engineering degree can’t or doesn/t bother to produce a monthly, quarterly, semi-annual or annual statements of the Video Hosts 10% reserve account from day 1. He can’t seem to be able to allow you access to, on his site’s system, your own daily revenue reports from the day you started with his site. He couldn’t even find a way to archive the information in your account with their site. His two partners, Mark N Albers, a CPA and Andrew H Kayton, a lawyer who was once appointed as a Master to the Los Angeles County Court for Attorney Fraud cases, can’t figure out that they needed to give the Video Host access to daily revenue information for more than just 10 weeks and some kind of statement of account for the Video Hosts’ 10% reserve accounts. These three SUPPOSED upstanding citizens and wealthy businessmen decided that the Video Hosts 10% reserve accounts were their very own six-month credit line. They were able to do as they pleased with the funds, return some, return all or nothing on the Video Hosts weekly revenue checks and never even have to explain or give any kind of an account statement. This is the equivalent to a company’s ownership using an employee’s pension fund as they please without ever getting permission and never showing any kind of pension plan statement or records to the employees. It is called embezzlement which against the law!
When you decided to ask for the information which should have been given to you by law, they inform you that it is has confidential information and you will need to sign a ” Confidentiality agreement because these statements contain proprietary business information. You said on Ripoff report that your daily revenues for video chat and fans clubs only show customers handles and the amounts spent. So what’s confidential about that information or proprietary? The 10% reserve account should only have transactions and explantions of deposits, adjusts, refunds or chargebacks and the balance of the account, again where’s the confidential information? Why would it take three weeks to come up with those reports when it had to be at their finger tips at all times? This behavior by Webpower/Ifriends and the use of their General Counsel in this manner is highly suspicious and indicates something fraudulent is happening here.
Here’s just a couple of questions more for you to answer, if you wish or even can:
Can you access the archives of all your daily revenue reports from all the other sites you have worked on since leaving Webpower/Ifriends?
Do any of the other sites hold back 10% of revenues for refunds/chargebacks in an account for the Video Hosts?
Can you show me and others what you mean by multiple Fanclub accounts for the same member and an account where it looks like you weren’t ever paid for the renewals of the Fan Club memberships?
Thanks again,
Elliotness29
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