Advertisers & Publishers Beware: IncreaseRev .com is Stealing Your Advertising Dollars and My Advertising Income

I’ve been very fortunate that in the 11+ years of operating mybeerbuzz.com to have met and dealt with a lot of people in the beer and marketing arenas. I’ve consistently worked very hard keep mybeerbuzz at the forefront of marketing, SEO and monetization opportunities, while still serving up what I consider to be valuable and well-trafficked content.  I do mybeerbuzz for fun, but as a free website, I have to continually test-drive new opportunities for monetization.  At the end of the day, mybeerbuzz has to stand on it’s own feet financially and the expenses need to get paid.

Believe me when I say it that just keeping up with advertising options can be a full-time job.  I am constantly investigating new advertising opportunities and in a constantly changing advertising playing field, this too can be a daunting process.

As I mentioned above, I’ve dealt with a lot of people and companies providing advertising opportunities…and while most of these have been very positive relationships, I’m disappointed to report on one company that has not.

I guess I’m always surprised when there exists a group of people who get up each day looking to earn their profit with deceit and on the back of someone else’s hard work, but they do exist so please consider my experience as a warning to future customers of IncreaseRev dot com.

If you don’t want the details, here’s a quick Summary:

• IncreaseRev promises to increase your advertising revenue by targeted Google AdX placements. 
• As you progress, they lower their payouts to keep you under the payout threshold levels they artificially create. 
• As you approach the threshold where they should pay for your advertising, they demand you eliminate all other advertisers on your site and give all placements to IncreaseRev. 
• Either way they drop you before payout occurs, giving them several months or more of free advertising on your site.

Full Story:

In May of 2019 I was approached via e-Mail by Kevin Lucas from a company called IncreaseRev.  Kevin sent the following on May 8th:

Your programmatic ads revenue can be optimized upto 100% using our premium Google AdX account. We have rising demand of advertisers which we are running 20% to 35% as preferred deals for our publishers on below placements :

• 970x250 & 970x90 for Above the fold (ATF)
• 336x280 & 300x250 for Mid and Below Articles.
• 120x600 sticky on left hand
• 300x600 on sidebar

CPM ranges for US traffic are below:

• Banner Ad is above $1 and goes upto $4
• Outstream video ads is above $4 and goes upto $8
• Preroll video ads is above $8 and upto $16.

We strictly work on 80:20 rev share and maintain 100% transparency. You will be seeing daily Google raw report on our Dashboard which no other ad network does.

Looking forward to your positive response for mutual interest.

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Regards,
Kevin Lucas
Ad Opt Expert

I followed up saying I’d try IncreaseRev out and Kevin replied:

Hi,

Thanks for your response. Kindly try us with our 970x250 ATF or 120x600 left hand sticky where we will produce more revenue than your Adsense.

Below are the points that will make our business model more clear for you:

1. You will be getting login panel to monitor stats with gross revenue to maintain 100% transparency from our side.
2. 80% of the revenue is your property and only 20% will be our service charges.
3. Payment cycle is net 30 days as per Google payment terms. We pay via Wire Transfer and Paypal.

Please add attached pub ids on www.mybeerbuzz.blogspot.com/ads.txt. Let me know when the pubs are added so I can send it for approval. After getting approved I will send you ad codes and login details.

We see potential to increase your earnings up to 100%

From there I placed three different IncreaseRev ads on mybeerbuzz and started tracking their progress.  After just 30-days with IncreaseRev, I noted that their eCPM was significantly lower than promised and averaging at just .2888629 (28-cents).

My initial complaint was met with Kevin Lucas stating that we had not been on IncreaseRev long enough to earn higher eCPM, but after 60-days it would increase.  When the eCPM did not increase in 60-days, I again contacted Kevin Lucas.

At this point Kevin began to demand that we pull ALL other advertising on mybeerbuzz and give IncreaseRev ALL of our advertisement placements.  After I refused to pull any other advertising, Kevin and IncreaseRev continued blaming their poor eCPM on the fact that we were serving other ads.  This from Kevin Lucas:

Hi,

Alright. Now we are in Q4. Our in-house experts are fully packed with top deals.

Kindly remove all other Adsense/other Adx ad units so we can have one window for your all inventory which will help us to easily optimize your revenue. 

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Regards,
Kevin Lucas
Ad Opt Expert

At the 120-day mark I again noted the low eCPM had continued  down (my next lowest advertiser was over 10x higher than IncreaseRev)and also noticed that Increase Rev had not paid me for May, June, July, Aug or Sept, however their website indicated June and July had been paid.  I pressed IncreaseRev and Kevin Lucas for explanation and proof of payment for June and July.  Kevin Lucas responded that they only pay out after we’ve reached $100 and we have not reached $100.

Kevin Lucas and IncreaseRev typically respond only once a day (in the middle of the night on eastern standard time), so solving a problem can take weeks.  When I pointed out to Kevin that his initial e-mail stated, “Payment cycle is net 30 days as per Google payment terms. We pay via Wire Transfer and Paypal” he instantly reverted to demanding we remove all other advertisers on the site and give IncreaseRev all of our placements.

At the time of this e-Mail exchange, we were just a few days away from reaching their $100 threshold.  With roughly 24-hours to go before we reached the payment threshold of $100, Kevin Lucas and Increase Rev sent me the following message:

Hi,

Please notice that we have removed your site from our ad network, kindly remove our pub ids from your ads.txt file and also remove the ads.

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Regards,
Kevin Lucas
Ad Opt Expert

Needless to say I’m more than happy to remove all IncreaseRev advertising from my site and I have pulled all of their ads and ads.txt entries from mybeerbuzz.

Unfortunately, as you would expect, Kevin Lucas and IncreaseRev have NOT paid for their advertising from May 2019 through Oct 23 2019 and they are no longer responding to any e-Mail messages. 

The scam here seems to be that IncreaseRev lures you in with promised eCPM rates, they lower those rates to ensure your payment amounts are slow to accumulate and just when you think you’re reaching their artificial payment threshold, they pull the plug and don’t pay for any of their advertisements.

IncreaseRev is based in United Arab Emirates (Office، 10، Level 1، Sharjah Media City - Sharjah - United Arab Emirates) and they operate the website https://increaserev.com/.  Kevin Lucas uses the e-Mail address: sales@increaserev.com.  Kevin Lucas is not listed on their team, so I suspect it may be a fake name as well.  Their team includes Helen Adams, Mohsin Feroz, Inayat Ali Shah, Alina Maria, Abbas Kahn, Brandon Fernandes, Andrea Smith and Mir Hussain, however they publish no contact info beyond sales@increaserev.com.

If you receive any contact from anyone at IncreaseRev offering you advertising, please be sure to learn from my experiences with them.

So now what?

After multiple e-Mail messages have gone unanswered, it’s not an easy answer as to how to recoup the money IncreaseRev owes me, however I do have a plan.

First up, IncreaseRev is dependent on serving up Google AdX platform ads.  My next step will be to work with Google Adsense to investigate IncreaseRev for fraudulent activities and withholding payment.  It is my hope that IncreaseRev will be removed from the Google Adsense/AdX program so no one else falls victim to their scam.

Secondly I’ve made note of the top 25 advertisers that IncreaseRev is serving ads for and I will begin to contact them individually explaining what IncreaseRev is doing with their advertising dollars.  I did plan to mention all of the advertisers using IncreaseRev in this post, however I doubt they have any direct connection with IncreaseRev.  It is also my hope that these advertisers work through Google Adsense /AdX to remove all of their placements with IncreaseRev.

Next up I’ll also be contacting the “Clients” listed on the IncreaseRev website including : Tuasaude, Indiatimes, MMA Imports, IGN (Imagine Game Network), Publimetro, Loghtshot, Creader, appleinsider, HansIndia and Almaany to confirm that they knw they are listed as sponsors on the IncreaseRev site.

In the end, it looks like I was taken advantage of by IncreaseRev, Andrea Smith and Kevin Lucas and that they never intended to pay for any of their advertising on my site.  Moving forward I will continue to document this situation and I will provide updates to this story as some of the things set in motion already come to fruition.

If you’re a current IncreaseRev publisher or advertiser, please contact me at mybeerbuzz@gmail.com so we can compare notes.  If you’re a potential IncreaseRev publisher or advertising client, beware..because they are likely trying to steal your advertising income like they stole mine.

UPDATES:

• 31 Oct 2019- Kevin Lucas responded to my 15th+e-Mail message to say that they would process payment at the end of Nov.
• 12 Nov 2019 – Kevin Lucas sent me the following:
  
  Good day to you. If you saw my last email, I told you that you will receive your all payment at the end of November because our payment cycle is net 30 days as per Google payment terms. (Your Oct' 19 payment is still to be paid by Google to us). I explained to you and still, our management notified that you are commenting bad reviews about our company for e.g https://prnt.sc/pvsq7f.

Kindly delete your all comments from everywhere or edit comments with positive reviews. It's badly impacting my job as I am your site representative.

I hope you will implement the above request and I will make sure that your payment I.e. $76 is released as soon as you make changes.

AND

We have issued your payment on your PayPal on advance bases, it's against our company policy but I have done special request to our finance team. So kindly remove all your comments ASAP from everywhere (as there are many) and let me know once it'll be done.    

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Regards,
Kevin Lucas
Ad Opt Expert

 

• After multiple e-Mail messages and contact with sponsors and advertisers, Payment in full for May 1st thru Oct 23rd was received on 12 Nov 2019.
  
  

This surprising 13 Nov 2020 Update:

Almost a year later I received this e-Mail from Kevin Lucas today:

I hope you are doing well.

Kindly completely delete the below URL as you have already received your payment:

• https://mybeerbuzz.blogspot.com/2019/10/advertisers-publishers-beware.html

In the above article, you have exposed our confidential emails which can harm our business. Similarly, we do not share publishers' stats and other personal information with anyone because they are the publisher's confidential information.

Since you have received the payment and the dispute has been resolved then why are you not deleting this article?

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Regards,
Kevin Lucas
Ad Opt Expert
Skype ID: sales@increaserev.com
Website: increaserev dot com
WhatsApp No: 00971568844379

There are so many ways to translate this, but I'll go with…Yes we intended to keep your earned advertising payment, but you spoke up so we paid you to get rid of the bad PR. Now your honest and detailed post about how we operate is making it difficult for us to do the same to to others.

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