Convert2Media

Today’s Fraud Friday installment brings to light quite possible a semi retarded china man. I only say slightly retarded because if he was fully retarded, he wouldnt be able to pull this off. Unfortunately for the industry he is only partially retarded and putting the absolute hammer down with his crew on credit card offers. He is highly sophisticated with multiple companies, aliases and a boatload of websites. The man’s name is Huang Feilong and despite what he might say, he is completely full of shit.

Who knows who helps him here. The method known is that hired actors phone into networks for account approvals. These hired actors could quite possibly be some of your best Search Marketing, Email or any other marketing method type of publisher. Yes, it’s a sick reality. Unfortunately, most networks that these publishers work with either dont know or they actually nest these publishers. We may get into that later. It hasnt been decided whether or not to get into another networks business yet or not. Preferably, I would much rather focus on the fraud aspect here and hope that networks do the right thing.

Anyway…

The method works that a highly educated publisher is hired to phone into the network. I really dont care how good you think your prescreen methods are, they’ve gotten past us, they certainly have gotten past you. The domain to check for is: xrayemails.com

This domain comes to the industry from an actual domain registrar that a frauding organization owns. I’ve said that these organizations are highly organized and hire actors (actual publishers) along with a domain registrar owned by the frauding organization only solidifies that. They have thousands of domains with thousands of websites built at their disposal to be used. We can cover that later. Let’s talk about xrayemails.

Xrayemails.com serves as a cloak for fraud. Typically you will notice this in your referrers. The referrers are designed to full affiliate managers into thinking offers are being emailed. Example:

The first website listed in the referrals is the site the frauding applicant used to sign up. The other red lines are indicators of other profiles and/or people that are involved or used to sign up for the offers. This basic common stupidity and really easy to figure out. I’m surprised we have not seen something smarter than this considering the amount of resources the fraudsters have at their disposal. There are many things regarding stupidity that can be said on their behalf but we can continue that later.

To the common affiliate manager, this looks like common referrer data from an emailer or some other legit form of refferer data. It simply is not. This site is owned by frauding organization that has their own domain registrar. As if the sites these morons built weren’t bad enough, they also copy exisiting sites and businesses online. You can see that clearly here where Huang Feilong got caught in that very act.

Be on the lookout, if this referring data is coming to you, your being frauded. Take a look at the application of the perp doing it. I bet it’s spectacular and you even called this affiliate. In other news we have more freelance job postings this week looking for CPA Network Approvals. We have tightened our approvals and security even more because we are specifically targeted on this list: