In any case, this story involves swagbucks, a get paid to (gpt) page that use you as a drone in exchange for points which you can redeem for money or crap you will leave collecting dust in a cockroach infested box. At first I liked swagbucks enough, after all it's not that different from working for a boss, but without having the boss give you the stink eye everyday. For a month I watched useless videos and saw worthless ads without a care in the world I even got paid once ($25) so I recommended it to my family and friends making some of them join the page. Out of five people that joined using my link, only one was credited as a referred member, but that happens so I let it go. The real nightmare began when I tried to get paid again.
After I managed to get 2500 points (which is the required points to get $25) I happily went to redeem them, only to find it impossible since now I needed to "do a one time verification" by text message or mail. Not email, mail, the type of mail that lost your grandfather's letters to his wife during the war only to deliver them after they both had died, the mail that makes you wait for a week only to return the crap you sent because the box broke in transit or because they got it to china instead of Florida. Of course I selected text message, because even Mr. T said "I pity the fool that trust the postal service". But surprise, my cellphone apparently isn't a cellphone, because my number isn't recognized as a number, so fuck me, I have to use the mail option. I put my address and decide to wait half a lifetime to get the card that verify I'm not a cheater in someway or somehow. Asshole move #1, but maybe it's karma for that time I stayed in an hotel and stole like 30 towels from the cleaner's cart, so I can live with that.
In the next day I began to notice a lots of random crap, to watch videos I had to complete captchas now, and a lot of the ads didn't give me points between them, but I mustered courage and keep watching more random crap to make at least a dollar that day. However, around midday my account logged off, and when I tried to log back in it gave me the message "your account has been deactivated". No reason why, no warnings, just a big "fuck you and your whole existence, we are keeping your points". So I decided to be sensible about it, and opened a ticket (which is the internet way of saying a complain that will be read at some point in this eon) and prepared myself for the worst. My ticket said this: "Why was my account deactivated? I haven't done anything wrong." Short, because when I worked in customer service I hated ramblings, and precise.
Now, up to this point things are understandable in a way, and while I find some things unfair, they are acceptable to some point, they have to protect their page so I can live with these things. But this is just the back story of the politest fuck you I have ever received, and trust me when I say I have received many.
A few hours later, at least they were quick, I got an answer from Allison (first sign of trouble, they use a first name to deal with people). This is the quote of what the answer was:
Now, that's a lot of words for an answer, but at least I got the answer. Apparently I was attempting to exploit and abuse SBTV (which is their branding way of saying watch videos for hours from aol while it bleeds CPU and memory like a horny toad). I used their toolbar to watch the videos, but I'm continuously installing and removing programs from my computer to test them, so I can understand that something might have changed in my system. Since this might have been the case I decided to answer with this:Hello (my name),Thank you for taking the time to write in regarding your Swagbucks.com account. After careful manual review of your account by our Compliance Team, your account was deactivated for attempting to exploit the services provided by Swagbucks.com.Our compliance systems have detected this account to be abusing our SBTV service.
We do not permit the use of unauthorized third party software or any browser add-ons not associated with Swagbucks.com.Any account found violating our Terms of Service automatically forfeits any Swag Bucks and prizes remaining in their account.To continue to provide great services and prizes to all our members, Swagbucks does not tolerate illegitimate viewing methods. Also, Swagbucks.com will not tolerate any user disseminating methods to try to cheat our site or community.To find more detail on issues like this, please read the following blog posting: http://blog.swagbucks.com/2012/01/understand-swagbucks- cheats-hacks-and- deactivations.html
You can review our FAQs to see more such policies: help.swagbucks.comWe apologize for any misunderstanding.Sincerely,Allison
SwagBucks.com
Manager Of User Compliance
Following the fact that Allison wrote me a long answer I decided to explain and ask for help to detect what exactly changed what, since they flagged me as cheating for using something I would think they could at least tell me what it was. However, lovely Allison answered with this:
Thanks for the quick answer. I haven't been abusing the sbtv service. I recently installed adblock, but I added swagbucks.com/ in the whitelist so I still see all the ads on your page. In any case, I still watch most of the videos (sometimes the flash player crashes but that's not common). While I have installed new things on the computer, (other toolbars from other pages and a tab organizer among them) it shouldn't affect the toolbar in any way. What I did notice was that spybot detected two malware (toolbar.babylon and toolbar.delta if I remember correctly) which were both quarantined, I opened another ticket about this and someone from swagbucks was still checking it. Maybe this is what you detected as a problem, but I indeed asked about it to you guys and no one told me I had to let them running. I haven't been using programs that affect sbtv in any problematic way. It still bleeds resources, it still skip around the related videos randomly and it still credit me every minute or so of watching a video. In fact, the only thing that has changed is that there are no longer ads on the square under the videos and that it no longer auto plays for some reason, but adblock doesn't show an icon so I don't think its blocking anything there and I am clicking so that the videos play anyway so I don't thing that should be a problem. If its about the fact that after watching 100 or so the seconds pass before the video loads, I can't really help it since the aol format shoots the memory usage of the flash player up, but I don't think I should be penalized for this since it's not my fault and I can't help it. In any case, what are you detecting? I can try to fix it if you give me the chance, because I'm really not using anything to abuse sbtv, and while I have installed new things to fix other problems unrelated to your page, I haven't seen anything change that much on your toolbar itself nor on my browsing experience in general beyond what I said before, and I whitelisted your page in the things I installed that I thought could affect anything.
Now, from this answer you can learn two things. The first being that their answers are copy/pasted, and the second is that Allison didn't even bothered to read what I wrote. Also, that "please keep in mind that you case is officially closed and this will be a final resolution to the issue" that is in bold, they sent it that way. A passive-aggressive way to tell you to fuck off. To this day I still want my answer, because even if I couldn't recover my account (and points) I still want to know what was detected as cheating so that I can fix it or at least warn my family and friends about it. So I sent this message:
Hello (my name),Thank you for taking the time to write in regarding your Swagbucks.com account.After reviewing your account, we have confirmed our decision that your account will remain deactivated for being in violation of our Terms of Service.To continue to provide all our members with great services and prizes, we must protect against any unauthorized activity that could potentially harm the Swagbucks Community and Swagbucks.com itself.You can review our FAQ to see more such policies: help.swagbucks.comWe apologize for any misunderstanding.Please keep in mind that your case is officially closed and this will be a final resolution to this issue.Thank You,Allison
Swagbucks.com
Manager of User Compliance
I see. However, I still don't know what went wrong, since you didn't answer any of my questions, so even if I get this account reset or start a new one I would still get deactivated again because I don't know what caused the violation. I have read the faq and I have read the TOS, yet I don't understand what the abuse was. I understand if you don't reactivate the account, could you at least help me find what happened? Even if you don't care about me, if we find something specific you could use it to either add it your rules directly or make a distinction in the future for all other users, maybe even to "catch" them faster or whatever. I understand you are probably busy, but at least help me find an answer. Was it the ,toolbar malware spybot detected so I need to reinstall the toolbar and allow it? Was it adblock so I need to whitelist some other url beyond swagbucks.com to keep it? Was it one of the other toolbars changing the config in someway? Was it the tab organizer somehow? At least tell me the date in which the violation happened or began, so I can limit the options and check what I changed that day, I'm guessing it happened on this month since I got paid earlier in it so it won't be that much of a hassle to look up a date. I didn't opened the ticket to get the account back, I want to know why it was closed in the first place.
The sad part is that after a quick search around, I found a bunch of people that said the same thing. "They deactivated me when I asked for payment", "I was deactivated and treated rudely when asked why", "This is a scam, the surveys say you aren't qualified after you finish and don't pay, and when you manage to get to the withdrawal amount you get deactivated". In fact, you couldn't find at least two or three complains about this in every page that swagbucks is mentioned. Granted, a lot of these people could be indeed cheaters, but cheaters tend to move on. Even if they don't and try to talk their way out of it, is it really OK to treat everyone like shit? You can be an asshole, and still be an useful asshole. Want to deactivate me? Fine. Want to call me a cheater? That's OK too. But if you work as customer service and someone ask you something, at least take the time to read it instead of dismissing it as lies or ignore it as whining bullshit.
Now, the reason for this post isn't to whine about unfairness, I learned a lot about it from my alcoholic uncle, it isn't an attempt to prove others I'm innocent, nor even a try to recover the points I wasn't paid. I'm not going to say swagbucks is a scam, nor that it sucks and you shouldn't try it, that's up to you. The one and only reason for this post is to tell the small piece of the world that could find this page a joke that says: "if being an asshole was an art, Allison is a fucking artist".
Edit: Well, my sweetheart Allison reappeared like a zombie to answer all my questions promptly and without leaving any doubts behind (sarcasm). This was her message:
Well, if that doesn't show they don't give a fuck about people, I don't know what does. Allison didn't even bothered to read what I wrote and decided to answer with another copy/paste that wasn't even relevant. So I, in my eternal pursuit of self flagellation, sent her another reply which said:Hello (my name),We are not at liberty to disclose our methods of locating these kinds of accounts. All that information is kept confidential and never released to any third party.We want all of our users to enjoy our site and take advantage of all the great offers that Swag Bucks provides, just as long as everyone follows our terms and conditions in our FAQ section.You can review our FAQ to see more such policies:We apologize for any misunderstanding. Thank you for your time and have a nice day.Sincerely,Allison
Swagbucks.com
Manager of User Compliance
Now, if they couldn't be bothered to read the other ones, I doubt their army of automatons will take their time with this one. But at least it's funny to check how long will it take for them to run out of prepared answers. Allison, my dearest sweetest love, you are still an artist. I guess I will make future posts about this but I will leave this one as it is. As the eternal landmark of how I met Allison, how I hated her enough to love her, and how swagbucks doesn't gives a fuck about people. Also my therapist told me to tell you that he didn't told me I'm an asshole so I should delete that, but even if he didn't say it he knows he thinks it, and since I'm an asshole I'm leaving it there.I could make a thesis out of speculations about what you think I did but that wouldn't matter. I can accept if you don't want to read what I write to you, but at least answer the single basic question of "how did I abuse sbtv?".If I understand it correctly, you deactivated my account for cheating but you can't help me find how it was that I "cheated"? Mind you, I'm not asking for the methods you use to judge if someone cheats nor how you detect cheaters, I never did. What I am asking for is an answer about what I did, if anything at all, in order to avoid it if I were to open another account and accept your decision about deactivating this one. You say I abused SBTV, how? That's all I want to know. You say "...as long as everyone follows our terms and conditions in our FAQ section" (you gave me an outdated url that redirects to the main faq page) but I went through the TOS again and I don't understand what exactly did I do that you found questionable.Now, it's possible that it wasn't any of these things. maybe it was something else completely, an update of a program, some other program I installed that affected the browser unexpectedly, maybe it was your mistake, maybe you felt like deactivating people who made too much swagbucks. I can live with that. But I have also been reading about other people cases, but since I was watching sbtv using your toolbar I couldn't do anything like refreshing, and iFrames would be useless since the toolbar opens its own small window that can be dragged outside the browser window. But instead of telling me anything, you keep copy/pasting messages that don't even apply with what I am saying.
Now, since yesterday I have researched a bit. The toolbars didn't change the about:config except for adding lines, so those weren't it, and searching around I found that the tab organizer doesn't affect the content of the browser beyond adding shortcuts so that can't be it either. So that leaves 3 possible causes, adblock, the malware spybot found or the memory spikes after watching some videos. If it was the malware spybot found, you should have answered my old ticket that asked about it instead of deactivating me. Something along the lines of "we discovered it a false positive and to use the toolbar you have to make an exemption for them". If it was the memory spikes, you are being totally unfair since I can't do anything about those and I bet most people suffer them anyway. And if it was adblock, you should have put, somewhere were people can see it, something that says "for adblock users you should add (whatever) in the whitelist". Instead, no matter how much I search around for it, I can only find users telling other users that it's ok to use it. Even on your own facebook https://www.facebook.com/swagbucks/posts/ 10150360161384758 no one from the team bothered to answer and that post is from years ago.
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