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Oh boy ... am I ever frustrated and just a little angry.

I've just spent the best part of two hours chasing my tail around a succession of government departments only to end up right back where I started ... and I so love wasting time. Basically those couple of hours can be boiled down to this.

I need to complete a form online for one department but I can't do that till I open an account with another department and link the first department to that account ... but the second department won't let me link the first department to the account until I fill in the form that the first department won't give me till I've linked them to the account.

Can you believe it? I certainly wouldn't have believed that anything that crazy was possible ... but I do now that I'm stuck in the middle of that crazy loop.

Actually I should be feeling pretty good today. The sun is shining, the birds are singing and I finally managed to extract a rather large sum of money from a local who has owed this money for almost two years.

I know that I shouldn't have let the account go that long but I managed to get caught by what my partner describes as a typical business parasite. During the time this guy has owed me the money he has expanded his business here in town, bought out another business, moved to bigger premises and opened another store in the next town ... and he's been using the money he owed me to finance some of that.

And all I could do was watch it happen because every time I thought we had finished his work he would ask me to add a little bit more ... change some of the details ... take stuff out and then add it back in ... and every time he would ask me to do something he would hint that payment would be made just as soon as I had done the work.

Now you might think that a story like that sounds typically mainstream ... that it wouldn't happen here in adult ... but I have to tell you that there are people here in adult who have the same grubby approach to business as my client has.

These guys pull in affiliates to do their marketing with offers that are almost too good to refuse ... they offer you plenty of support and for a while the sponsor payments keep coming but then ...

You see someone complaining that the same sponsor has cancelled their account and kept their money ... someone else says hits the boards and asks if the same sponsor has missed a payment with anyone else. There's the story that the sponsor has just changed banks and there will be a delay or someone at the bank made a mistake and locked the account so any checks that did go out will almost certainly bounce.

Of course affiliates shouldn't worry ... everything is good ... there's money in the bank ... it was just a minor glitch and we should all go on selling their great product.

Meanwhile the dodgy sponsor is funnelling the cash off into some other project or some other bank where it can't be touched because he's just using us affiliates to finance his next business venture.

It's right about then that affiliates should bail out of his program but of course many of us are going to have a ton of links to change out and we're going to have to find someone to replace him ... and who wants to do that?

It's all too hard to change so we stick with him and keep sending him signups until we begin to realise that everything is far from being good and by that stage everything is so not good that the sponsor has actually disappeared. His websites are 404'ing ... his emails are bouncing ... and he has moved on to the next bunch of suckers that he can rip off and he's taken our money with him.

So how do you avoid getting caught by parasites? You have to be vigilant ... you have to watch your sponsors closely ... even the ones that everyone says you can trust. You have to make sure that you don't become so dependent on just one sponsor that your business fails if something happens to him.

You have to be prepared to pull your links the moment it becomes clear that something is wrong and you have to be prepared to do all those things with every single sponsor if you want to survive in this industry. You also need to learn to pay little attention to excuses and reassurances because words mean nothing.

The world is a tough place and if you want to survive you have to spot the parasites and get rid of them as fast as you can.