Watch out! Taboola will SWALLOW MONEY in your account! (7)
We started running campaigns on Taboola at the late of March, ended up with losing $6k+ (remaining credit in our account) and getting our account frozen without any advance notification in no more than one month!
You may think that we run any uncompliant campaigns or use any un-approved creatives. But NO, all the creatives we used for running had been approved by Taboola!
We started running campaigns on Taboola from the late of March after spying a campaign which had been running for more than 3 months on this platform. We thought it would be profitable for sure, so we sighed in and got our Taboola account active within 3 days after our first deposit of $2.5k. We just used the creatives that we spied by only changing the domain name. Quickly we got our campaigns approved and we started.
For the first week, we just spent money for testing——we got app installs but our ROI was negative. Things changed afterwards, we started to make both ends meet and got positive feedback from the advertiser. All these made us so happy, that we deposited another $6k. When we ran out of this $6k, we began to make money. Thinking of our creatives had been used on this platform for more than 3 months, we are 100% sure that we won’t have any compliant problem if we want scale. That’s what we did! We deposited another $8k, and started scaling.
We got feedback from advertiser that we need to pause for a while for our leads to mature. So we stopped traffic for 1 week, and then we restarted again.
Good times don’t last long. In the morning of April 24th, I went up and logged in, just saw the notice as below:
It’s like a thunder from the clear sky! We still had $6k+ credit remaining in our account, “where is the money?”
We opened the mail box and found this ”Notice of Termination” mail.
It says that the termination is the result of “cloaking” or other techniques. Absolutely lying! Why we cloak since we use a lp that had been run for more than 3 months or even longer? The most important thing is we can make money using this lp. What’s more, we don’t know how to cloak. Maybe someone won’t believe in this, but that’s the truth.
We replied to the mail and asked for evidence that prove that we are using non-standard URL and got no reply. We asked our AM but she said our account was now out of her business. We kept writing mails, but got no reply.
Finally we gave up fighting back for our account and asked our contacts to refunding the remaining credit on our account. We never thought it would be a problem to get what we own! But we got reply that they won’t turn back our money!
Again, we wrote mail to ask for evidence, but that’s the last mail we received from Taboola.
Maybe we had to accept the truth that we lost our $6k. But it’s unfair. Nobody told us our creatives were uncompliant when they reviewed it. But when they found it uncompliant, they suddenly frozen our account and refused to refund us. How could things be like this?
We finally know the truth recently.
Tabooloa’s biggest competitor——Outbrain paused all the gambling related campaigns (including social casino app download) in the past days, and when Taboola heard about this, they though it would be wise and safe to do the same thing with Outbrain to maintain their relations with those big sites. So that’s why they cut almost all the social casino app campaigns in the platform.
Yes, that’s a strategic decision. But with users paying for that! We are pretty sure that there were many affiliates got their account frozen in the recent days. I hope they can refund the remaining credit.
And the purpose that I write this article is: first, try to draw attention of more affiliates that running campaigns on Taboola (pls be careful that even your approved creatives could be thought uncompliant as long as Taboola wants to say that; second, I want to get back my money. I don’t want and have to pay for Taboola’s decision. You could pause all the social casino app campaigns, but we did nothing wrong after we could all our creatives approved.
Based on what they emailed to you, the problem were not the creatives but what happens after the click, so your landing pages or the offer itself, or maybe a GEO redirect on the offer etc ... These redirects that happen at the offer level or the affiliate network level are causing trouble quite often, it got me banned/suspended a few times already ... I would certainly LOVE to see networks and advertisers stop doing that. If I was in your shoes, I'd explore this option and get a confirmation from the advertiser, so you could prove it wasn't your fault ... sometimes it does help. And of course, assuming that what you presented here was the truth indeed.
From my understanding the problem was with your LP being cloaked. I don't think they would ban you for nothing. Maybe there was some kind of hidden Javascript redirect code on the page you just ripped and you didn't clean up the code before you re-use that LP.
They don't reply to your email because they don't want to provide any document which you may be able to use legally to fight against this and win. If I were you I would talk to a lawyer. Personally I don't think a company as big as Taboola needs to freeze accounts to steal the balances left.
Edit: They would reply to your lawyer's professional email. I'd get a lawyer.
I didn't use direct link but my own LP. I am sure I cleaned all JS codes/files/links on the LP and css file. 
Can you post your LP URL here?
Originally Posted by sunwukong
1. What country are you based out of?
2. Have you thought about a chargeback on your credit card?
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