Fraud Friday has made it back into the hearts of all the weirdo’s who like to read this crap. I was getting emails from networks, managers and advertisers regarding how much they liked the Fraud Fridays. I was actually very surprised, but I guess it’s because nobody really talks about it much. Well, for awhile I took a dump on the Chinese and pissed a few of them off. Well, a little anger turned into a full fledge war. These morons took the situation to another level and must have assembled a small army to come after me.
I began receiving loads of Chinese spam. I mean these guys really went to a whole other level. They decided to opt me into about a million bullshit email lists. I started receiving Chinese lotto crap, land from other countries and all that crap we’ve seen before. However, I was dealing with tens of thousands of messages daily. This wasnt the occasional spam we are used to, this was setup and targeted specifically at me.
Then came the phone calls. I started getting weird phone calls at all hours of the day. I started receiving death threats and then they pushed even more. They started threatening my family and saying things about my kids. I layed off for a bit but now that I have the help of proper law enforcement, I’m going to start pushing some buttons again. Convert2media hasnt suffered a fraudulent lead in months. We’ve dealt with a couple of compliance issues but we’ve been fraud free for quite some time now. However, the fraud applications are still rolling in so I know they are getting into networks across the industry.
So now we come to an issue that is occuring rapidly. Affiliate Fraud Account Sharing. The fraud has been taken down to a level where we have forced them to adapt once again. These people are HIGHLY motivated and will adapt to everything and that’s what is happening currently. They arent just hiring actors to get accounts approved now. They have raised the bar and are actively seeking whitehat publishers who run legitimate leads and offering them payment to promote from within their accounts. The whitehat publisher is paid in full of their earnings and then they receive payment on top of what the fraud brings in.
I’m sorry to say that this is absolutely ridiculous. I cant imagine why a legitimate publisher would participate in something like this but it’s happening. They are “blending” the fraud now. Networks, you are not helping the situation by letting it go on. However, I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt because you may not realize the situation in full.
Here’s a quick rundown on how and why they are getting away with it. A publisher’s account is promoting diet offers thru pay per click and landing pages legitimately. However at the end of the month, they have 5-6 leads on a debt offer, maybe 3-4 leads on another credit card offer and probably 15-20 leads on dating campaign followed by 30-40 leads on other lead gen campaigns. While the volume comes in from the legitimate campaigns, these other campaigns appear to the Affiliate Network as if this publisher was “testing” the market and it didnt work from them. At that low volume, you may not even get a “bad quality” or “fraud” report from the advertiser. Also, these frauders are going to pick offers they know are widespread across networks and will try to “blend” the fraudulent leads.
At the end of the month you are probably hit for $300-$500 per account. Add in the fact they have at least a few thousand accounts in the industry this comes to quite a substantial hit to advertisers. It also puts the network in hot water because if your quality sucks, you lose the offer. It puts all the legitimate publishers at risk too because they lose the offer as well obviously.
It’s a freaking mess out there, so pay attention to your publishers. Something has to be done because even C2M has been affected even though we have had 0 fraud leads in months. We have been promoting offers that have been pulled because they were frauded elsewhere and this truly sucks.
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Wow… Incredible… Why would someone want to risk their account for a couple of bucks from the fraudsters? I guess if you have a new pub that doesn’t make too much that this could be appealing. But definitely not worth loosing an account and getting that mark of fraud on your record.
Blow the fckin lid off them!
Ruck, have you networked and talked to other affiliate networks out there about this whole problem? This could lead to a whole ‘nother government agency designed to protect fraud for aff networks, especially if other affiliate networks come forward and are willing to HELP start protecting this industry. Can you imagine the combined budget of just a FEW of you guys?
You’re one of the few people who are putting yourself and business on the line to out the frauders.
What really worries me though (from the 6th paragraph) is if these Chinese ppl start blackmailing big-name affiliates. Getting fraudulent leads and then saying to them they’ll do more (and get the affiliate banned) if they don’t pay up what they’ve already done…although I’m not sure how they’d track these guys down, but who knows.
I’d say a black list might be good, but then you’d risk banning innocent people as well…
Wow never thought that they get some personal attacks to your family. Thats is something from the bottom drawer.
They arent using “their” accounts nor are they using their real names. It’s only thru tracking them down that we have discovered it. Yes technically a fraud mark on their record sucks but most of the cases we have spoken about with the network are names we dont of. This basically means that the network DID catch the fraud, but they didnt unmask who was REALLY behind it.
Wow, that’s incredible. What fuckwits, to threaten your family.
I don’t understand what would inspire a legit publisher to allow fraud on their account either. There’s just so many reasons why it’s a bad idea, not to mention COMPLETELY immoral, especially if you know they’re fraudulent leads.
Oh I see, because these fraudulent leads look like normal ones, you can’t necessarily blame the affiliate (since (for the most part) affiliates have no control over fraudlent leads?)
Hey dude, good work.
Mebbe it’s time to setup an AffiliateMarketingBlacklist.com site and list the fraud affiliates and networks who’re providing bad leads, shaving, scrubbing.
Something like a ripoff report with an cpa/aff mktg slant?
In the incentive industry, one of the more popular scripts has a “cross checking” feature, where you can link sites together to share data. You can select just how much data you want to share about your users, like their IPs, names, etc.
Maybe this is something to look into?
A SOAP/xml interface to a central blacklist? The problem is the piggybacking that these fraudsters seem to be doing now. If a legitimate affiliate is dumb enough to get paid for a fraudster’s fraudulent leads, they deserve to be blacklisted anyway