I have found a website hosted by your powweb stealing affiliate commisions. The website in question is: http://clicibank.com/ with nameservers: ns1.powweb.com ['65.254.254.135'] [TTL=3600] ns2.powweb.com ['65.254.254.134'] [TTL=3600] The affiliate is overwrite affiliate cookies via in iframe. This method is illegal as the person gets affiliate commisions that other affiliates deserved. This is essentially the same as stealing. Because the domain is a typo of the affiliate company "http://clickbank.com/",it's reach is huge. if you promote wow product, zygor, idemise, you are loosing commisions! because of this. I've send an email to the abuse section you should do also if you promote these products or hate people stealing commisions.
I don't think it's "illegal" per se. Go find me a law that prohibits overwriting affiliate cookies via iframe...
It can be considered illegal, there's no law specifically for cookie stuffing, however cookie stuffing goes under 'fraud' . Several big website owners have been sued over this, but this is rarely the case. Most of the time, the affiliate network just bans the user and that's it. However, if it's at a large scale affiliate companies can file a law suit. I've also seen clickbank ban people over cookie stuffing, they do not allow this.
I'm not a lawyer, but when one party takes something that belongs to another party and claims it as his, this is called stealing. The affiliate in quesiton takes "a tracking id that is proof of me refering a potential client". We can discuss on this matter, but we can also take some steps, as this is costing people money, his whois information:
Hmm... I waited 1 minute for the page to load, but it just kept bouncing through a bunch of domain redirects. What's with that?
you need to view the source (press cntrl + u ), and you understand, it loads different hoplinks into iframes and after 10s+/- with a meta redirect, it redirect to clickbank these are the links loaded in seperate iframes:
I understand...and it's not really clear cut either way. That being said, people have been profiting from mis-spelled domains for many years now. What he is doing is unethical, but I highly doubt you could sue him and be victorious.
A little bit off-topic but... how can cookie stuffing be an effective technique? As far as I know: a) the most recent cookie gets the sale. b) CB purchases tend to be impulsive; I mean, if people just felt like deliberating and doing research they wouldn't buy info products. c) Customers won't reach the sales page out of the blue after getting cookie stuffed... they'll eventually get there from a proper affiliate site, whose cookie will prevail. I mean, right?
This is an example of a "Good Post". I've always wondered how people think. You can do this and get away with it sometimes, but eventually you'll get caught. Now the site has been suspended. Great!!
Nice work, good to see him get banned, even if he was only picking up the occasional commission from it.