Legal and illegal credits according crazygrape

crazygrape Wrote: hi,
a couple of users suggested i post to this thread, what we consider 'legal' and 'illegal' trading in credits as a clarification and i agree that's useful:
* users get some credits when you sign up so you can trial the service.
* we also reward referring users who successfully sign up a new user (ie, genuinely sign up a new user).
* if you don't use your credits in 90 days, they'll expire. this is the same if you bought credits from your Network Operator (in some countries, the credits expire in as little as a few days).
the reason why we give out credits is twofold:
* we want you to have a chance to trial things, but everyone is going to have to understand that we do have shareholders and ultimately, they do want to see us make money. so we're always striking a balance between paid for and free credits.
* we want to reward people for genuinely signing on new mig33 users and making the community bigger. a bigger community is better for everyone.
With merchants:
* trying to buy credits in many countries is very difficult and many things in mig33 costs money (e.g. calls, sms, mobile content). so the merchant programme is all about letting users get together (often in groups of three or more) to start trading in credits. in return, they can make money (we have some merchants doing HONEST business with as much as USD$20,000 per month).
* often, merchants need to get going and to trial the service. so we are fine with merchants who make a handful of referrals to build some credits up and try selling some credits amongst their friends.
* in the future, you'll be able to do a lot more with mig33 credits.
what we consider illegal and will shut down accounts for:
* outright fraudulent payments (e.g credit card fraud). i don't think this needs an explanation
* if you knowingly trade in credits earned from Fraud, or knowingly receive fraudulent credits without reporting them.
* abuse of the referral programme. so if you start signing up more than a couple of users who aren't genuine, we don't consider that very honest.
* abuse of the merchant programme where some users wholesale abuse the referral / trial systems and start playing around with honest merchants.
its' not always easy to track down what's legal / illegal, but as i've said before - we log EVERYTHING, and there are some ways that we can tell what's going on. i'm not going to reveal those techniques on a public forum because i dont' want to educate the fraudsters as to how we're catching them (and we catch several a day). we also know that there's lots of framing going on, where one gang tries to frame another. I''m a genuine believer in innocent until proven guilty, so we do proceed very carefully when we see fraud happen.
lastly, i'm not going to comment on what is happening in Bangladesh and reporting back to this forum isn't the right thing to do (although i know a lot of you have been asking, and some of you have been very abusive about it). i can confirm that we're not ignoring this thread and we're treating the matters very seriously.
Hope that clears things up.
Steve