I haven't seen any refunds yet (fingers crossed -- not many sales lately, so hopefully no refunds either).  I agree, this is a really worrisome coincidence . . . if it is one.  But then again, I don't think there's any chance that we'll ever know what is really happening. There was such a stink about the fraud last year that I don't think they'd EVER admit it if it happened again.

And we still can't see our downloads between November 21 (??) and December 5 -- and although I've not seen anyone specify yet if their refunds were from downloads during that period or not (although some of them definitely close to the time the site went down), wouldn't that suck to have to give a refund on a download you haven't even been able to see yet!  It's annoying that they can be so quickly clawing back money for refunds, but they still can't get a month-old system failure fixed to show missing royalties and downloads. 

About the only benefit of sales being wretched for me is there's not much to get refunds on

I saw the posts about this, but one person said they'd contacted CR about 20 or 40 refunds and were told it wasn't an error, but a large customer had changed their mind about a project and decided not to use the images! That sounds more like a Getty kind of practice than a microstock site practice.

Haven't seen any forum comments from admins and the numbers of refunds sounded scarily high. Especially as we are now given no explanations whatever as to the specific reason for that refund.

Can't pay the back royalties but can deduct refunds...I don't see conspiracies but priorities seem to be skewed so the ones that pay out money get much lower on the list.

ETA: I read the last few threads and one diamond contributor said they had 235 refunds in the last week

Two hundred and thirty five.

If it's not a bug, that's some sort of business practice that iStock has to put a stop to. That is totally insane.

Can't pay the back royalties but can deduct refunds...I don't see conspiracies but priorities seem to be skewed so the ones that pay out money get much lower on the list.

ETA: I read the last few threads and one diamond contributor said they had 235 refunds in the last week
Two hundred and thirty five.

If it's not a bug, that's some sort of business practice that iStock has to put a stop to. That is totally insane.

Couldn't agree more, on both counts.
 

About the only benefit of sales being wretched for me is there's not much to get refunds on ...

That's exactly what I was thinking. Not much to be concerned about. Maybe I just have to buy a small coffee and bagel today with my istock earnings instead of a large coffee and bagel.

Edited to add what I posted in the istock forum:

It's way too early for an "I told you so," but assuming this is fraud again (and I don't see how it's not unless someone can accidentally download 235 images), I was pretty confident in my prediction the last time that this would happen again, this year. Ok, so I cut it close on the "within 2011" part of the prediction. But hey, it looks like I still may have gotten it right.

Everyone wanted to ignore the little gem of info from that conference call in which istock promised to not take back fraudulent purchase funds from contributors while the new security measures were being put into place. That left us open to the possibility that later on they could resume the take-back policy, which right now it looks like that is what's happening.

We don't have all the info, and until we do I'll keep an open mind about this. But right now, this reeks of fraud all over again, and if it is, I'm not surprised that istock would be taking back funds again.

They left themselves that nice little loophole to resume take-backs once the security measures were put into place. No surprise that they're taking advantage of it.

I haven't followed the post, but when I looked yesterday it seemed that they all had crown icons.  Did this happen to any indies?

Good work, Sherlock!
There's only one indie on that thread, and he had one small file refunded which might be within 'normal' tolerance.

Very intriguing: the plot thickens.

Quote from: Pixart on December 09, 2011, 12:08

I haven't followed the post, but when I looked yesterday it seemed that they all had crown icons.  Did this happen to any indies?

Good work, Sherlock!
There's only one indie on that thread, and he had one small file refunded which might be within 'normal' tolerance.

Very intriguing: the plot thickens.

And also, as noted by crossbrain66, the amounts of many seem to be exactly $2.50, even between exclusives on different royalty rates.

This is going to take an awful lot of explaining.

And we still can't see our downloads between November 21 (??) and December 5 -- and although I've not seen anyone specify yet if their refunds were from downloads during that period or not (although some of them definitely close to the time the site went down), wouldn't that suck to have to give a refund on a download you haven't even been able to see yet!  It's annoying that they can be so quickly clawing back money for refunds, but they still can't get a month-old system failure fixed to show missing royalties and downloads. 

I just checked, and last download data is missing from myUploads from November 26 - December 2nd, still.  I did get the money for downloads during that time, though.

Isn't that just suspicious?
So many refunds from the month that reporting crashed so bad.

I have a conspiracy theory: they have to give a result for this quarter and they are short for it and will try anything to alter the numbers, from crashing reporting to applying refunds and so on. Then they go to G masters and report a wonderful quarter and get a bonus.

I think you might be on to something. It's far easier for contributors to believe that there are a bunch of incompetent fools running the IT dept at istock than it is to believe that istock would actually be stealing and messing around with their money. A few names come to mind...Bernie Madoff, Enron, mortgage companies, etc. etc.

I think Sean's theory from the istock thread is probably more likely the right answer, that these refunds are from referral credits given for free to new sign-ups, and people were gaming the system and signing up multiple new accounts to get 10 free credits repeatedly.

And as he says in that thread, it's wrong that the contributors are being held financially responsible for screw-ups in the referral program.

Agreed.  However, there are at least two reports (and not everyone reports them here) of credit card fraud in the month of November here.
http://800notes.com/Phone.aspx/1-403-265-3062/5

could be probable that during maintenance currently on the site and during the past weeks there was a big fraud, using stolen credit cards? ... how if at that time the protections of the site were lowered....just IMHO

I haven't followed the post, but when I looked yesterday it seemed that they all had crown icons.  Did this happen to any indies?

Yes I had some.