He ceased communications with us. Regardless, though, the "I can't pay you because your rebill rate is low" excuse is pure bullshit. If that publisher was sending fraud sales, then I can see him not paying for them, but 20% rebill rate would not indicate fraud. Poor quality sure, but not fraud, so the merchant should be paying for the sales. They could have even chosen to reverse the sales that were no good, but you can't walk away from an entire bill because you don't like the quality.
Chances are they spent more time playing with their dicks than monitoring the performance of the people sending them traffic, realized WAY too late that things weren't working out and now have zero cash to pay anyone. So they'll simply ignore everyone, disappear for a while, then relaunch as a new company a few months from now.