Cleverat Enter Voluntary Liquidation

This may not come as any great surprise to many, but it’s officially been announced on their site that Cleverat (www.cleverat.com) have entered into voluntary liquidation.

There have been rumors around for some time that they were struggling; a search on the brand name takes you to this page on the A4UForum where a number of affiliates have complained about having problems in getting paid from them.  The lack of a rebuff was a clear sign something was wrong.

From my understanding Cleverat worked with a number of merchants and were a key publisher, especially in the Finance space (i.e. Vanquis) but as the Finance industry suffered with the recession it seems that Cleverat were one of the “networks” that were hit the hardest.  Apparently they were also paying well over the odds in CPLs to try and get links switched across to them which seems to have been a bad move.

Tom Bryant, who owns the popular freebie site MagicFreebies comments:  “It’s crazy that they have been allowed to keep going for so long – I’m current owed around £10,000 which was due November 2009 but they cut off all communications and I just hope that the liquidators are able to re-coup some of the money owed.  To say I’m fuming would be an understatement.”

Looking at the Jaak Media site, it seems that Cleverat have been removed from here, and there are no notices on their other sites (Smart-Quotes, Mrs Cashback, etc) about them being part of the liquidation so it’s unclear if this is an oversight or if they are setup as independent entities and will keep trading.

I hope that the affiliates waiting for payment receive their commissions, or at the very least as much as possible from them and hopefully this will be the last of the lead based networks to suffer.