Background:
I joined Associated Content in February. I was a member until my account was unethically "banned" by AC in March. At that time, I held a Level 10 Clout and was identified as a Top 1000 member. I have always written my own content and played by the rules. It would appear that the same can not be said for associated content.
Rip Off:
1. On March 9, I logged into my account and was blocked. I received a message at that time that stated:
"Due to a violation of our terms and conditions, your Associated Content account has been closed and you are banned from participation. Any pending payments owed to you have been cancelled and the corresponding content has been removed."
2. Since I have never broken any rules I was confused by this and thought it must be an error. I immediately contacted Associated Content via their web form to ask what was going on.
3. On March 11 I received a reply from [email protected] telling me that my account was banned for having multiple accounts (which I have never had). Specifically, they said:
"Your account has been banned for violating of our Terms of Use and Master License Agreement. You have opened at least two accounts which clearly violates our MLA and TOU. Because we are required by the IRS to report contributors income, we only allow one account because it eliminates the possibility that a contributor can hide income."
4. I immediately replied to point out that I have never had multiple accounts. My wife does have her own account, under her own SSN, but we had asked about this before her account was opened (way back in 2008), and I still have a copy of the email from them where they stated this was ok. I explained this in case this was the issue, but I really wasn't sure if that's what the problem was or not.
5. On March 19 I had received no reply, so I forwarded the entire message to the standard address of [email protected] and asked for a reply.
6. As of April 4, I had still received no reply from admin or from legal. At this time I contacted admin with a notice to immediately remove all content, which they will certainly refuse to do without a court order.
Additional considerations:
I had once caught Associated Content cheating on the stats for their performance bonus. I caught them at this red-handed and still have the documentation to back it up. They employed the same tactic at that time, simply ignoring the matter and hoping it will go away, but it has not and I still want my performance bonus.
Moving forward:
At present, I have plagiarism checks being ran on every article I have ever published at AssociatedContent.com. As soon as I identify the sites they have sold my content too, I will be sending out Cease and Desist letters to them as well.
In Conclusion:
I have been a long-standing member in good faith of this community and never broke any rules. AC violated the terms of their own Master License Agreement and instead of handling the situation in a professional manner, have chosen to ignore the problem. The end result is that I am left with no option but to move forward with legal action against them. The manner in which they have handled this is also considered criminal under my local State Statutes. As such, I will also be swearing a criminal complaint against the principles of the company, just in case they should decide to come here to present their case.
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