Recently I made a big noise and called out a company called Blog Distributor Inc for not paying me the money that they owed me, every month they would simply push my payment date forward a month and ignore every email that I ever sent to their support team.
Negative Publicity
I not only posted about this on a couple of popular websites & blogs (including this blog), but I also mentioned it on Twitter and Facebook and I even contacted a few companies who had sent out press releases about going into business with Blog Distributor Inc.
It was shortly after I contacted ActSeed (one of the companies partnering up with them) that I finally got a reply from someone associated with Blog Distributor, someone running the ActSeed Facebook account passed on my complaint and I was emailed within hours by a Mr. Bruce Chapman.
He was rather rude and sent me a very blunt email:
Dean,
I am assuming that your complaint is about not getting paid. Our payment policy clearly states that bloggers outside of the United States get paid when they accumulate $100. in billings. You have only accumulated $72. in billings due. You should not be complaining about not getting paid when you have not met the standard billing amount.
Bruce
I checked the terms again (I must have checked them over a dozen times since I started working with them) and lo and behold they had secretly tacked on a new rule at the end that stated a non-US blog would be paid once they hit $100. This was not there BEFORE, they couldn’t even be bothered to hide it within the other rules & pretend I missed it.
I was prepared to let this go, after all I had just received an email (which I still have) promising me that once I hit $100 they would pay me. I did a few more job opportunities for them and they were swiftly approved.
They now owed me $140, so I had passed the $100 minimum and every job opportunity said that they would be paid on September 4th.
Did They Pay Out?
When September 1st came around I had a quick check and noticed that the pay out date was again pushed forward a month. September 4th came and went without any payment being sent to me.
I contacted their support team and also sent an email to Bruce Chapman, since he had a different email address, on the 1st of the month and again on the 5th of the month and have received no reply at all from anybody.