Earlier today, we heard that THINX customers were ticked off to find the company had suddenly disabled all the $10 gift codes they’d collected as part of a referral program. When we reached out to THINX for a comment on their referral program and any changes to it, the company said it had to disable all gift card codes after a few bad apples took advantage of the system.

The company told Consumerist in an emailed response that THINX saw “thousands of fraudulent orders created by ‘customers’ who were severely abusing the referral program as it was structured.”

According to THINX, those customers created fake bots and scripts that generated new email addresses, allowing them to then use those emails to sign up for the referral program. That brought them thousands of gift cards, THINX says, because the program was designed to send a $10 gift card to any new customer who created an account.

“Thousands of pairs were ‘purchased’ with these fake gift cards and sold on the second hand market. The loss was devastating,” THINX told Consumerist in the emailed statement.

“After we discovered this issue, we still had hundreds of thousands of dollars in unused, active gift cards from the program and a grand larceny investigation revealed as many as half could have been created maliciously,” THINX’s statement explains.

Because of that, THINX had to disable all the remaining codes.

“We let as many legitimate customers as possible know that we were disabling the current program and enabling a different one that would provide new $10 off codes that could not be combined together,” the company said.

As for any value the customers lost when those emailed codes were disabled, THINX says the company reached out to anyone with a significant number of legitimate gift cards and offered them “several different options for how they’d like their remaining credits handled.”

“If for some reason anyone affected has not been notified of this change, or has missed the original emails pertaining to the situation, we sincerely apologize and urge them to reach out to support@shethinx.com to have the matter rectified immediately,” THINX said.

As for the customer who claimed that her post had been deleted from THINX’s Facebook page, the company says: “We never delete comments and we’re working on answering her momentarily.”

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