Russian Association of Financial Markets Members
(RAFMM)

Claim # 7-08/2011

DECISION

January 16, 2012

Guryevsk town

August 21, 2011, the RAFMM Arbitration Committee received a complaint from InstaForex Company customer Mr. Dragunov, begging to consider his situation. The Complainant claims that his partner account and trader accounts were debited funds he had received within the InstaRebate service on the basis of clause 5.5 of the Partnership Agreement. The Customer considers these actions to be unjustifiable.
Below is an excerpt from the Partnership Agreement (clause 5.5):
“Partner may not get commissions from his/her own accounts and his/her relatives’ accounts, if he/she is physical body, and from private accounts of founders or their relatives’ accounts, if the Partner is corporate body.”
Reasoning his stance, the Complainant claims that the Partnership Agreement is represented only on the website of InstaForex Company and is only available at the stage of registering a partner account.
The Customer registered an account with InstaRebate Partnership Programme (http://www.getforexrebate.com/); the website of InstaRebate does not contain any references or links to the Partnership Agreement, thus he was not duly informed beforehand of the restrictions specified in clause 5.5 of the Partnership Agreement. As a result, his partner account and trader accounts were registered under one name.
The Customer claims that he did not have any intentions to deceit the system of registration as partner.
Later on, when checking the transfers at the request of the InstaRebate service, the Company regarded the situation as violation of the Partnership Agreement provisions and deducted the commissions transferred to the partner account and the accounts registered on the InstaRebate website.
According to the Customer, the actions undertaken by the Company are illegitimate.
The Complainant questions the legitimacy of the actions carried out by the Company; he provided the list of the accounts to consider.
In order to ground his stance, Dragunov also provided the correspondence with the Company’s representatives.
A representative of the Company says that the information available on the InstaRebate website at the stage of registering an account contains detailed description of the working principles and a well-pronounced aim – referring new customers. Auto-referring does not conform to the provisions.
The Arbitration Committee examined the documents provided and the materials of the forum on which the situation had been discussed.

Having considered the material of the complaint, the Arbitration Committee

ESTABLISHED:

1.    At the moment of the dispute consideration there was no Partnership Agreement available at registration with the InstaRebate project (http://www.getforexrebate.com/ru/) indeed. Nevertheless, there are the principles of working with the service where the aim of referring new customers is specified.
2.    The RAFMM Arbitration Committee took the opinion of Ksenia Lobas representing the Company into account. According to Ksenia, in case there is no agreement, customers should rely on the service description and the Agreement on the website of InstaForex Company. Still, the Arbitration Committee states that those who register with the Partneship Programme must have access to the Agreement so as to prevent similar situations.
3.    The fact of auto-referring on behalf of the Complainant is proven and took by the Arbitration Committee into consideration.
4.    After the rebates were cancelled and the negative account balance was restored, the Customer received profit which he then withdrew.
Having assessed the situation in question, the RAFMM Arbitration Committee decided that even though the Partnership Agreement is not represented on the website of InstaForex partner and thus auto-referring cannot be regarded as deliberate, the very essence of InstaForex Partnership Programme implies referring new customers and this is intuitively clear even without the Agreement.
The RAFMM Arbitration Committee made sure that presently the Customer continues successful cooperation with the Company.

On the basis of the abovementioned facts, the RAFMM Arbitration Committee

DECIDED:

1.    To regard the sanctions imposed by the Company against the Customer (deducting money derived from auto-referring, yet not the funds already withdrawn by the Customer, in compliance with the policy of the Company) to be legitimate and not subject to cancellation.
2.    To strongly recommend the InstaRebate Project place the Agreement regulating the services provided in the Registration section of its website. Taking into consideration the fact that the recommendation was implemented and the Partnership Agreement appeared on the InstaRebate website by the moment of delivering a decision, the RAFMM Arbitration Committee recommends InstaForex Company toughen control over regulating documents on the websites of its partners rendering supplementary services.
3.    To recommend the InstaRebate service pay the Customer a compensation for having detected the problem in amount of 100 USD.

EXPLANATIONS ANS RECOMMENDATIONS:

1.    Now that the Complainant knows all the peculiarities of InstaForex Partnership Programme, the Arbitration Committee draws his attention to a necessity of referring new customers in compliance with the Agreement.
2.    The Arbitration Committee recommends the Company settle the faults found during the dispute investigation as soon as possible, particularly lack of materials at the stage of registration.
3.    The Arbitration Committee draws the attention of the Company to an ethical aspect of the dispute and strongly recommends refraining from poorly considered actions towards customers in future.

The decision delivered by the Arbitration Committee is approved by the RAFMM executive board.

RAFMM President,
Evgeny Staroviborny