Scam? Who’s being scammed?
Maybe he is selling the clubs a poor bang-for-buck form of advertising, but the Fleet Street papers do the same thing every day!
The clubs would be able to track how many people are arriving to their site from GTE’s site and so can measure the direct referral aspect.
From what you say it sounds like a decent idea not executed as well as it could be.
I wouldn’t know the bloke from Adam, but when you publish a company’s name, name the proprietor and then drop the word “scam” without any notion of who is being scammed or how, I reckon that’s pretty poor form.