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Fluffy, looks to me like you just learned your first lesson about traffic trading. Being, never trust anybody you don't know.
Frankly from Scroto's responses I'd never trade with him, his attitudes are common but he's not demonstrating much of a "give a shit" when it comes to being fair with his trading partners. However, I dabbled in traffic trading for awhile and quickly learned that there's a thousand scammers for every honest trader. To thrive in that game you have to be cynical, suspicious, and have an itchy trigger finger. Which means that it's generally not worth it for a small traffic generator to trade with the big boys unless you know them and know they have a fair rep (like, say, Shemp does). It's not that they set out to cheat you -- I'm sure Scroto's honest in his own mind -- it's just that they have been cheated so often and so badly that they don't really give a fuck if they happen to cheat random strangers in the name of protecting themselves. Especially when the random strangers are sending such tiny volumes of traffic that the economics really shouldn't matter to anybody.
What I learned when I was starting out and trying to trade my initial tiny trickles of traffic was that you just have to throw trades at the wall to see what sticks. Try a new trade, send your traffic, monitor the returns closely, write the traffic black holes like Scroto on your blacklist, and move on. It's not worth drama, you're just looking for trading partners who value your traffic. You'll find some eventually.
You'll see folks here who say "shaving doesn't matter -- I don't care if I get shaved, all I care about is that I get a return per click that makes me happy." Traffic trading is the same deal. Cast your bread upon the waters, see what returns, follow the deals that are working and ruthlessly kill the rest.
I still do things this way. I've got a high-traffic blog with tons of valuable search engine traffic. But I'm trying to make sure I'm not 100% reliant on the search engines, so a week or so ago, I initiated trades with two large toplist-style link lists in my niche. Both of them had a force requirement, I set up appropriate links to force the trades. One of them immediately started to return very rewarding volumes of traffic, presumably based on my extra high productivity. The other one never approved my trade. After three days, I sent a polite inquiry. After two more days, I pulled that link. Did that owner "steal" my traffic? Well, sorta; or, more likely, they are on vacation or something and never even noticed the trade signup. My clicks are gone, I got nothing back, but it's not drama-worthy. It's just how that particular shady corner of the biz works. Me, I'm ahead because I seem to have a long-term and valuable trade that I didn't have a week ago. That was the goal. That's how it works. Sometimes it sucks. But, if it were easy, everybody would be doing it, right?
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