Merchant Fraud Endemic In The Industry

I had a conversation last night with a fellow affiliate who has had a similar experience to the one I had with HMV and the Wii Console. The history of the matter is that it appears HMV continued to offer the Wii console on their site despite not having the stock to fullfill them. So many affiliates kept on promoting the product with them with no chance of earning a commission from those sales

This I can cope with - it's just a case of lack of communication and both the merchant and the network not managing their campaigns with what I call "due care and attention". For me this is a case where if we were valued, the network and merchant would say "fair enough, we ballsed up, here's some compensation to acknowledge that you've probably last a few £k because we didn't do our jobs properly".

There is one thing I can not stand and that's the plethora of merchants that are seemingly manipulating orders to avoid commissions.

I've got wind from this affiliate who had an email exchange with one of the buyers that one particular merchant continued to take Wii Orders without stock (fair enough!) but when they did have stock they called up the buyers and told them they had to put their order through on the phone, but not only that, if they didn't take out a 3 year product warranty they wouldn't be getting their Wii. This, in my mind, throws ethics straight out of the window in the affiliate sense, but surely is illegal in the wider sense?

Then the affiliate himself was called up and told that they couldn't put his order through unless the games he had with them.

So there's two issues:
The merchant following up existing web-orders to amend over the phone;
Forcing buyers to buy expensive 3 year warranties.

I'm shocked and appalled by this! There has to be more openness and we need to inform other affiliates of potential problems much earlier! Merchants that act in this manner should be removed from networks with due process. Affiliates should refuse to work with these merchants if they ever pop-up on another network.

I was going to post the emails that he forwarded to me, but we're awaiting official investigation from the network. I'd be very much inclined to report this matter to the Trading Standards and the press as it's absolutely outragous! But am I right to get this annoyed and incensed? What other tactics do we have to rid the industry of this sort of contempt for affiliates?