Zeek Rewards abruptly deactivated accounts for members in Serbia, Slovenia, Belarus, Egypt, Croatia, and Macedonia in late October. No immediate explanation followed for nearly a week, leaving thousands of users without access to their accounts.
Zeek Rewards support staff then began attributing the account terminations to "sanctions" and "government policies" specific to those countries. One support agent stated the issue related to "your countries government policies (not the Serbian people itself), that has required us to not list your country anymore." This vague response did little to clarify the situation for affected members.
Concerns immediately surfaced regarding the inclusion of Slovenia, an active member of the European Union. The EU operates as a unified economic bloc. If political reasons were truly behind the bans, many expected all EU member states to face similar restrictions, which was not the case.
Zeek Rewards management remained silent as discussions intensified. CEO Paul Burks eventually provided an official statement on the company's news blog, two weeks after the initial bans.
Burks wrote that the United States Government, through the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), maintains a list of "sanctioned countries." He claimed US law makes it illegal for US companies to do business with individuals or entities in these nations, citing penalties ranging from large fines to 30 years imprisonment. "When we became aware that there were affiliates in our system who were from these prohibited countries we had no choice but to remove them from the program," Burks stated.
This explanation appeared to resolve the matter for many Zeek Rewards members. But an independent check of the OFAC website Burks linked, treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/Pages/Programs.aspx, found no explicit sanctions against the countries Zeek had banned.
A few days later, a ScamTelegraph reader directly emailed OFAC for clarification. The official reply confirmed the absence of sanctions against Slovenia. "The U.S. does not currently maintain any sanctions against Slovenia," the OFAC Compliance department wrote back, directing the inquirer to the same list of sanctions programs and the Specially Designated Nationals List.