Going through my end of the month affiliate sales, I am noticing a high rate of fraudulent activity from two of my affiliates running our code. It's so bad that we won't be paying a single nickle to either of these people. Our system is CPA and pays either $25 or $50 (depending on the purchase). Now, as the program mgr, I question every nuance for these conversions and when something stinks I WILL CATCH IT. My question here is, why cheat? Do you really feel you can escape your program mgrs eyes by committing fraud? why try to defraud my (or any other) business only to give yourself a bad name? I'd like to hear back from publishers and mgrs alike and see not only how we collectively can work together to provide an environment where fraud is not only not something that would come to mind by publishers... but also to see what is going through a publishers mind when you decide to try to cheat. Your feedback is appreciated.
lol, I understand that to a degree. Lazy people THRIVE at scamming those who do work, but at what cost? collectively these two have lost over $1k for two weeks worth of 'work' from me alone and are now blacklisted in linktrust.. was that worth it? What else can I do to encourage real, legitimate work and not fraud? this isn't rocket science after all...
ahhhh so linktrust is what you guys use lol. was looking to start a CPA company since i know the industry so well and as a cpa marketing coach I can tell you why people commit fradulant leads. Many people dont have the start up cost to promote ads the correct way. usually the free way is the blackhat or unethical way. It suck for the affiliate company but look at it from the user standpoint. they are trying to make money to. what i never got was why waste time on doing fradulant leads and why not take that time to get them the correct way?
Well its pretty simple really.... have you not heard the old saying "Nice guys finish last" ... People are aware of this, and society is getting worse and worse as time goes on. People get more violent, do more illegal things and inevitably cheat the system in order to succeed.... Ill give you an example, I upload a youtube video... Someone downloads it and creates multiple accounts, then spams it 200 times and puts their affiliate link in the description. Now how can anybody seriously compete with that??? Oh yeh, and the laziness part is a huge factor for alot of people aswell...
Its not exactly laziness. Its an art. An art which is like hacking because to cheat the system isn't something which everyone can do.
The extent of the fraud was spectacular though.. they apparently had their "friends" making the purchases (which were 75% of the commission, so they'd spend $37 and get $50 from us.... however I guess they use an automated system in doing so which made it stand out clear as day as fraud... I mean, it was glaringly obvious lol. Is there a place where affiliates go to look for legit programs to join or is this essentially "it"?
Coming from the world of Adult Affiliate marketing there's a ton scammers and fraudsters in the world. There's actual internet cafes in places like Vietnam for example, that they have groups of guys sitting around teaching each other how to scam, trading stolen CC numbers, and etc. I think a big part of any affiliate program management today is being able to detect fraud or you will be losing money.
We'd figured that requiring a purchase (CPA) would help disuade that... apparently not Sad part is, it's all Americans in this scam as your system only allows US/Canadian sales! Unbelievable.
I'm not saying there's not US fruadsters, but a few proxies, a hit bot, stolen US card numbers, and check forwarding service is all they would need to be anywhere in the world and make it all appear like its all in the US and that's usually what they do to make US companies feel more at ease. Also, adding a CPA offer would likely increase the chance of fraud because payouts tend to be higher and really it only takes a proxy and stolen CC number to boost their profits.
Which leads me to one of my clues lol. Addressess not matching up with geolocator in linkshare (which is, albeit, not perfect). Honestly, there were so many give aways it was almost like they wanted or expected to be caught by all but the low lying fruit.
people using fraud activity for easy job this kind of people never have success so they still using that trick