Bad experience with Leadbolt

I’ve noticed Leadbolt advertise here a lot. Here’s my study case. I’ll let you read and decided by yourself

"Hi ****,

I can see that you are unable to log in as your account has been suspended. Due to various complaints from our advertisers, a joint investigation with LeadBolt’s internal audit team was undertaken and has revealed that your account has been linked to fraud.

Our advertiser’s have informed LeadBolt that our network will not be paid for the revenue earned on your account, therefore it will not be paid to you. Our advertiser’s strictly require that all offending publishers have their accounts suspended from the network and LeadBolt agrees with this action.

Your LeadBolt account has been permanently suspended and you are not permitted to create a new account.


The LeadBolt Team

Ticket Details

Ticket ID: ******
Department: Mobile Escalations"

"Hi **** ,

<COMPANY NAME> have more than 300 applications both on the Appstore and Google Play, and I’ve decided to test Leadboltad network with two of our apps.
These two apps makes together $1500 for a single day from ads.
We’ve tested Leadbolt network for several hours to decide what is the best way to implement Leadbolt on ****, depeding on revenue from diffrent time zones, applications, etc.
Eight hours only after starting using your service one of our engineers tried to login to Leadbolt and got blocked.
This is illegal act. Fortunally, we’ve implemented our own ad mechanizem and shut down leadbolt easily from our servers, with money lost of several hours.

Again, this is illegal act taken by you, one sided.

Take notice that if we do not hear positively from “Leadbolt” , we shall pass this matter to our legal department, which shall make complaint to the relevant authorities, and also to take legal proceedings against “Leadbolt”, including injunction, without further notice.

Meanwhile, all our damages and costs as a result of “Leadbolt” are reserved.

Regards,
"

I cannot speak for Leadbolt, but this does happen.

We suspend/ban accounts as well IF they make it through the approval process and can still be linked to fraud.

I’d suggest you ask them how they linked you to fraud if there is some misunderstanding, you guys can resolve it or rather clarify it.

Hope this helps.

Cheers

Meh… sorry, but that post has SO MANY red flags.

You have 300 apps. WTF ? Just how did a company create 300 apps without code-generation or using spam apps or ones that just load a website ?

You say that two apps make you $1500/day. Let’s say the other 298 apps make you 1/10 of that each. That is $75 x 298 = $22350 / day.

You say you lost 8 hours of revenue. That is 8/24 x 1500 = $500… or 2% of your revenue FOR THE DAY.

So, you tried an experiment, lost 2% of your revenue FOR ONE DAY ONLY … and your response is to send an email threatening to call lawyers/etc (in broken/bad English) and then register on a Android forum and complain IN YOUR FIRST POST? Lawyers don’t even get out of bed for $500/HOUR … never mind trying to figure out international BS.

This is SOOOO not the response a typical legit company would have…

Other thoughts:

  1. Their act was not illegal (as you claim). It was simply termination of a contract. This is allowed by law.
  2. Claiming publicly that a company did something illegal when they have not done so might very well mean YOU are breaking the law (slander/etc).
  3. Leadbolt’s Terms of Service (this would be the legal agreement you agreed to before starting with them) allows them to do this.

Even if you did nothing wrong most company’s TOS says they can terminate you for anything. It just happens (even if assuming you did nothing wrong).

And 99.9 percent of others probably have no issue with them in this regard. Meaning they (Leadbolt) don’t care, because they’ve got billions of impressions from other developers still. And I’m sorry if you did nothing wrong, but Leadbolt (along with all ad companies) have to provide value to their advertisers to entice more campaigns… If they really felt you did something wrong they have to ban you for their interests.

And unfortunately it isn’t really worth their resources to argue the decision. Same thing for Google Play, Admob, etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I do understand your frustration. I would love if companies were at least transparent in their decisions. But it doesn’t make sense in an upward market.

Cut to the chase, we suspect that implemeting ad html code on server side for mobile client - like we did - is not the same as implemeting the same html code in client side. Leadbolt detect it as a fraud and shut down our account.
I suggest Leadbolt imrpove their documentation (can’t blame the engineer this time, sorry) and their customer service. I thank you for commenting and devoting time to read this.

So you were downloading HTML of the ads on server and then sending them to client? That must’ve looked bad for leadbolt - all ads from the same IP.

Send me your pub ID and I’ll see what went on. We’ve dealt with a ton of fraud (as I’m sure our competitors have too) so like most, we tend to take a zero tolerance policy on anything that might be deemed fraudulent. This has nothing to do with our documentation and customer service (unless I’m missing something here).

@SendDroid: We tend to not tell people how we linked them to fraud cause in some cases, they try to signup again under different credentials and bypass what caught them the first time.

@Leadbolt I suppose that when you add a new ad type in an already deployed application and you test it, the impressions you generate are not considered as fraud… Which reminds me that you should really setup a per-ad test mode, because currently the test mode is only available for the whole app before it goes live.

@Androider, I don’t work on that area so I can’t tell you the exact reasons for why he got banned. As for the second part, I’ll forward that along to the tech department and see what we can do about that.

I just tried to login to leadbolt today and I got the same message - account suspended. I have only been using them for about a week. They did not send me any message, notice or anything. I have been using AdMob for years without any problems. I have also been using some other networks for a few months, again without any problems. The same applications are good with Admob and the rest but not good with Leadbolt!!! This sounds like a ‘trick’ to avoid paying publishers - I cannot explain it differently.

I am really happy they suspended my account now. I will remove all traces of Leadbolt code out of my applications and update them as soon as possible.

My suggestion: Keep away from Leadbolt. I have no interest in any ad networks; I am just a publisher trying to make the most of my apps in a legal way and I have used several networks. Leadbolt is the only company that suspended my account; and on top of that, there was no notice or warning, no email, nothing - just a message saying that the account is suspended on their login page. The only thing I regret about this is the time I have wasted to implement Leadbolt into my applications.

P.S.
Regarding Leadbolt advertisers reporting fraud by publishers, that is definitely a cheap excuse. I was not displaying ads from Leadbolt, only their ‘App wall’ feature and they still suspended my account.

P.S. 2
I am making a lot of money from the rest of the networks but only a few cents (daily!!!) from Leadbolt so I would be crazy to try and cheat Leadbolt to make more money.

If you want to be ‘strict’ on your fraud policy, at least try to do it right!!! Banning a publisher without a notice or reason is really unprofessional. This has been the worst experience I have had on the Internet and a TOTAL waste of my time.