The Advertising Standards has banned an advert from property website PropertyWikia, which offered to pay affiliates £100 for every week that the site did not sell a property.
A complainant challenged whether the following claims were misleading and could be substantiated:
1. Each property listed for sale – earns you a £2,000.00 once-off sales commission
2. Each property listed for rent – earns you a £100.00 once-off rentals commission
3. If we don’t sell a listing within 12 weeks, we’ll pay you £100.00 compensation every week until we do.
4. This is your opportunity to earn £250,000.00 in just 25 weeks with no selling; risk; experience; knowledge; special skills or referring required; and
5. The income is guaranteed against failure.
The owners explained that PropertyWikia was a relatively new concept/business which launched in 2010 and took its first paid-up affiliate registration on July 1 2011.
It said that since then, it had not had an affiliate sale from listings made by the resources of an affiliate and that, to date, there had been fewer than 800 affiliates in the business. It said that once a property had sold, commission payment would be paid out 30 days from the month end of the month the property was sold in.
However PropertyWikia said there were currently no properties older than 12 weeks and therefore, to date, it had not paid anyone £100 in compensation.
PropertyWikia also said that no affiliates had been with them for more than six months in order to reach the 25-week point, but confirmed that they had been asked by some affiliates when commission would be paid and had also been asked about guaranteed payouts, how they were validated and when they would be due if validation occurred.
It also confirmed that it had refunded just over £18,750 back to affiliates who decided to opt out and supplied the ASA with some refund examples from Paypal.
The ASA noted that both commission and compensation would only be paid to affiliates once a £2,000 threshold had been reached and while it noted that this was in the site’s terms and conditions, it did not consider that this was suitably qualified as the page where the claims appeared was not linked to the terms and conditions page on the website.
It also noted that although it asked for contact details of affiliates in order to establish whether they were owed commission or compensation, PropertyWikia did not supply the ASA with any of their details.
Further to this, it also noted that PropertyWikia did not provide it with any information on the progress of any specific affiliates nor were they able to provide us with a better understanding of how the affiliate system worked. Because it had not seen adequate evidence to support the earnings claims on the PropertyWikia website, it concluded that the claims had not been substantiated and were misleading.
The ASA ruled that the claims must not appear again in their current form. It told PropertyWikia to hold evidence for any earnings claims in future.
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