I’ve refreshed the list of $25 bonus referral links for new ING Direct customers, and I’ve discovered what seems to be an interesting problem, possibly making it more difficult to use the links. First of all, in order to qualify for the $25 bonus, you must be a new customer and you must deposit at least $250 initially, not including the bonus.
In addition to these requirements, ING Direct seems to have made it more difficult for sites like Consumerism Commentary to share links provided by readers. In short, to make sure you can tell whether a link is still valid or expired, you must clear your cookies from your browser’s cache before clicking on the link. You’ll only need to clear cookies for ingdirect.com and its subdomains.
I’ve added a note in the original post stating that anyone wishing to claim the $25 bonus must clear cookies to be confident they’re accessing the latest referral link. Nevertheless, I expect this will slow down the cycle of bonus usage, which has been about ten per week here at Consumerism Commentary.
The waiting list is still closed. If you’re interested in sharing the referral bonus links available to you — you will earn $10 when someone successfully uses a link you provide — keep reading Consumerism Commentary to find out when I open the waiting list again.
Published or updated February 8, 2009. If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the RSS feed or receive daily emails. Follow @flexo on Twitter and visit our Facebook page for more updates.
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
That’s kinda weird. Why would someone have ING cookies when about to click a link on your site? I don’t know about others, but I always have a second browser minimized in the system tray. That would be useful in a case like this.
The place it would cause a problem is if someone clicks on link 1, which is expired, and goes back to click on link 2. There is a cookie that stores the first link. The second link would then appear expired even if it’s not. It’s easier just to clear cookies for *.ingdirect.com before clicking on the link.
I just noticed the same thing, Flexo. That makes it more difficult to keep track of links. You would think ING would want more people to sign up – especially when banks are hustling for extra depositors more than ever.
I get it now. That would make it harder, and might explain why the link I submitted here last time wasn’t used.
Sucks that they lowered their rate again, but they are excellent in the customer service department and who can turn down $25 for such little work!
I haven’t noticed this. I wonder if it’s intentional, or a bug. I know that they recently re-worked their links.
This is driving me nuts. I just had an email exchange with a reader who couldn’t get the links on my site to work. She ended up finding links on another site to use. It’s frustrating me to no end. I may take down referral links altogether, because it’s such a hassle now.
Ok, my boyfriend took a good hard look at what was going on with the cookies today, and found out what the problem was. The old-style referral links looked like this: http://home.ingdirect.com/promo/promo_set.asp?t=…. and the new style ones look like this: https://banking.ingdirect.com/savings/set_promo_cookie.vm?t=
The problem occurred when someone clicks and old-style referral link, and then clicks a new one, without clearing their cookies in-between. The best thing to do is eliminate all old-style links from your site, and tell everyone you know that has referral links on their site, because the less old-style referral links there are on the web, the less this will happen.
The problem still occurs if you click on a new style referral link that has expired and then click on any other referral link. This has all been fixed here already. We’ve only been using new style links here since February 8.