3. Why do we remove royalties for fraudulent downloads?
It stops contributors (real or faked) from self downloading with credits bought with stolen credit cards and absconding with the royalties.
Is this saying the only reason they charge back contributors on fraud is to prevent contributors from using stolen credit cards to download their own content and then pocket the royalties?
Interesting. How many stolen credit cards do you have lying around at the moment? Well, last time I checked, I had none. Funny that.
iStock really has a lot of gaul suggesting their contributors use stolen credit cards to steal money from iStock. This is simply salt in the wound and what they have done here is twisted things around to say contributors are guilty of fraud and the punishment is for contributors to be charged back when in fact it is iStock that permits a contributor's intellectual property to be stolen and wrongfully used by criminals. Leave it to lawyers to come up with schemes like this though. Well, I think it's more than obvious the real reason they charge back contributors on fraud. Nuff said.
4. What is the refund policy on iStockphoto.com?
Customers have 14 days to return a file for credit. When they return a file, they agree to not use that file going forward. In order to reduce any abuse of their agreement, we closely monitor patterns of refund behavior by customers. Additionally our compliance enforcement team handles unlicensed uses.
I have at least 120 refunds this year. 40% of them are from sales that were made last year and at least 80% are on sales that are older than 14 days.