Is Hotels Combined a scammer?

If you do not know what Hotels Combined is, now is the perfect time to do so.  Hotels Combined is an Australia-based  hotel search engine that a person can use to compare hotel prices in a certain location and from that information the person who is going to be traveling to that location can choose which hotel will be perfect for his budget and his needs or preference.  Hotels Combined invited partners that can help in the marketing and promotion of its services and products.  Something similar to what Amazon did in order to increase sales. They call these individuals associates.  So Hotels Combined invited associates, gives the associate a link to Hotels Combined and if someone books a hotel going through the link of the associate, the associate then gets an income from that sale.  Sounds good; right?  Some associates really earned from this method. However, for some reason, Hotels Combined scams one of their associate for the amount of $400 and not contented with that, Hotels Combined, deletes the account of this individual.  For what?  So that the individual can not claim that he was an associate of Hotels Combined?  So that there will be no evidences of their linkage?  All that for the amount of $400?  What a cheap scam for supposedly a hotel search company renowned to be one of the biggest in the planet.   Hotels Combined, if you are unaware of this thing going on in your company you had better do some investigation in order to get to the bottom of this, otherwise, if more of this continue to happen in the future, Hotels Combined's reputation will go down the drain.  I pity the associate who anticipated he will  receive the $400 that never arrived and worse, when he accessed his account in Hotels Combined it was no longer existing.     If it was merely a technical error, then I hope it will be rectified soon. Get your act together and correct this gross mistake, Hotels Combined.  The sooner, the better.