A guy signed up to our affiliate network with legetimate looking information and a very legitimate looking website. The whois info for the domain matched the information on his application. His email address was He even had unique looking content on his site with banners already on it. After a few days of being our affiliate I noticed that he started generating leads and I was thinking great he seems to be doing a good job and he has good traffic. Then I noticed that his CPC was a little high so I started checking his clicks and leads and noticed that they were mostly coming from the same set of IP's. After googling these IP's I found that they were proxy server ip's in the US. My guess is that he was using a program to set the referring url and ip of his clicks and fake the leads. The moral of the story is when an affiliate tells you "dont worry about my traffic" when asked about it its time to think about terminating that affiliate.
Welcome to running an affiliate network. 300 affiliate networks exist because of fraudsters like this. new networks will have the hardest time fighting this fraud with no prior experience. The fraud puts your good affiliates at risk as well, since the fraud guys send leads to the same offers real affiliates send to. When the advertiser sees fraud they wont pay for any of it, leaving either you or your affiliate with not being paid. My advice. Make sure you speak to someone on the phone, most fraud cases wont speak to you, but some will so be cautious.
Here's another tip for networks to help spot affiliate fraud. I'll give it to you at the bottom of my story. There was a huge very organized Chinese affiliate fraud ring, that stole my identity a couple years ago. Applied to TONs of networks and programs pretending to be me. My name, site, address phone and even a 5 Star email address. Luckily some networks that do phone verification called to see if it was really me that signed up, so I was able to figure it out. But could not stop it. Some merchants that don't know me thought I was the one doing the actual fraud. It was a mess for months. They wait until right before it's time to get a check and then change the payto address. In my case even when they changed the pay to address it was not even obvious because they were so smart they had PO boxes that sounded like real addresses all over the country. They set one up right in OC where I lived, so it would not raise much suspicion with AM's, they'd think I just moved down the street. I got that local mail house to collect and keep all their mail for a month and send me copies of all the envelopes. Those guys had TONS of checks from tons of networks made out to a bunch of different peoples names. TONS! We tried to get the FBI involved. I could not even get to anyone that knew enough about the Internet to understand the situation and how big this was. That was only one mail house. They had mail houses all over the country forwarding checks to them in China. I tracked several of them down, but could never get anywhere as far as stopping it. Then it finally died down Shawn Collins told me people have done the same thing pretending to be him. So if I were a network I would set up a big red flag for any time the pay to address gets changed. Not that many affiliates are going to actually move every month that it would be that labor intensive to call and verify identity. The other thing I would do is a welcome email verification step. In my case they used an email address on my domain, but not one I had ever set up. It was something like . At 1st when I started getting 'welcome emails' from networks, I knew I had never applied so I just ignored them, thinking it was some new tricky back handed method of recruiting. "Hey thanks for joining, lets make money, how can I help you get started." But once I got 2 calls from 2 networks the same day and asked questions I found out what was going on. THEN because of that info@ email address I was able to spot any incoming mail generated due to the fraudsters. So I would require a reply email to verify their account. Just like when you join a forum, you log in or post until you click the link in the email. If networks did that, then in the beginning before I caught on, when I was just ignoring the emails, those accounts would not have been set up. Then if they don't reply to the verification email you call to let them know they need to and do phone verification. It was weird when I started getting all the "congrats you've made a sale" emails because I knew it wasn't my money and the sales were fraud. Funny because some networks I had to email several times telling them the story, telling them I didn't make the sales and they were fraud, and I'd still keep getting the emails letting me know I was racking up the dough. Here's a great thread with a bunch of other tips. Fighting Affiliate Fraud - Put Your Detective Hat On Hope this helps and best of luck!
just give an option to reverse leads to merchant with individual performance report ... merchant can simply find out if affiliate is fraud or not by calling email list/leads etc ...however its impossible to eliminate fraud .. work with selective publishers dont approve everyone .
Some good tips, i always do phone and email verification and if the applying affiliate requests that they be paid by wire transfer or direct deposit i ask them to send me a W9 Form and then i verify that. It's really too bad that all of this is required just to sign up to an affiliate network though it's necessary at least until people learn that if they applied their brains and talents toward an actual legitimate business they could earn a thousand times over (and keep it) what they make by concocting some scheme to get something for nothing.
you can ask for references of other programs they sent traffic to, check to see if their IP matches their location, really scrutinize the first few sales/clicks, look to see if the domains they presented you seem like they get traffic (only for new people, once they have sent good traffic for 6 months or so, you can check them less frequently) its a lot easier to catch these guys than it was years ago, just watch the ones that send a small amount of volume from many different accounts
there are several tell tale signs of the fraud rings, it is best not to publicly announce what they are doing as it will push the ring to change their habits. There are probably 5-7 different fraud rings leading back to China, that do what is described above. the best thing you can do is call them or speak to others privately on what they do, airing it in public will only push them to change things up.
Yes, The best and only thing to do is call them, It's also never a good sign when you call the number and it is out of service. Just calling them and understanding where there traffic comes from and how they promote it and what works best for them will really help.
You guys are really helpful although I agree we shouldn't help them get over on us by telling them what they are doing wrong.
You have to be careful, this happens more than you'd think. With more complicated software, it is becoming easier to commit fraud like this. My advice is to verify all claims and keep a watchful eye on all account activity ambitic
As an affiliate who has never been terminated from a network and never done any fraud crap, I'm here to tell you that if any network attempts to force me to reveal a traffic source that I don't want to, I'm going to tell them to go screw themselves. Aside from basic checks when they sign up, you've just got to audit at the end of the month. There's already so much distrust between networks and affiliates you're rarely going to find an affiliate who is producing and will give you what you're looking for. If you don't like it, there's a lot more networks out there, probably with the same offers. And your affiliates will most likely end up going over there. Now if networks wanted to have a chance at getting traffic sources, maybe they should get together and kill off inhouse teams, and have an option to stop passing referrer data to merchants. Until then Edit: And for the record, networks that don't push me about traffic sources are a lot more likely to get them. If there's a problem or it's a highly scrutinized niche(ringtones for example) then they can talk about it. None of this pre-emptive bullcrap.
The bottom line is if your leads look fraudulent and your not giving any info on how your leads are being generated then its in the networks best interest to let you go becuse you could skrew things up for other affiliates in the network.
If your leads look fradulent, it's different. But you better have something better than "your epc is too high"(within reason). I have landing pages that get a crummy ctr, but convert 3-4x better than others promoting the same offer. So am I supposed to disclose something that is obviously working well for me to the network? Hell no.
just because an affililiate won't reveal his sources certainly doesn't mean that affiliate should automatically be investigated.
Someone who is known such as yourself wont have to worry about explaining a high conversion rate, someone who lurks in a network and their AM doesn't know them, chances are they will be pulled and categorized as fraud unless proven otherwise. Some of the fraudulent affiliates in networks are in my own opinion probably related to this http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17805134/ I think the scammers in that dateline report, instead of buying product have figured out they can use stolen identities to rip off networks for the CPA payment, this is why you see so much fraud in incentive (and why most advertisers bailed on incent sites). They are moving in to lead offers and non incent to make their money so be cautious of who you allow in your network. Do your due diligence on the affiliate during application review and while they are active on your network. For the real affiliates who get mad at the cautious nature of a networks review processes (Some networks take it to far) be mindful of what the networks have to do to protect everyone involved. Build a relationship with your AM's, their assistants, and managers. The more people who know you the better. Dont hide behind a computer, call a company let them hear your voice.
^--epic advice. Cooler heads prevail I guess haha. That really works both ways too. There's a one or two AMs that actually took the time to know me decently well and I'm infinitely more receptive if they have any questions about traffic sources. Actually, my AM at copeac is one of those two.