I'm paying an advertising company to drive traffic to my site in order to receive signups and am paying based on how many signups they generate. However, I've found that many of the signups are coming from the same IP address and often the ones with the same IP address are one after another. Does this mean that they could be recruiting people to sign-up multiple times? I know that different machines can have the same IP address if they're on the same network, but nearly half of the signups I've received have a duplicate IP, so that seems suspicious.
It does seem very suspicious, did you try emailing the affiliate company? And how many sign ups are we talking about here? 2 or three coming from the same IP, or 20-30.. or more? Some more info might be helpful. Gotta remember many places share IP addresses (Library, school, even large ISP's such as AOL).. And maybe they happen to be targeting your adverts to one such area. Again, some more info would be great to help determine the source of this :/
There were around 130 acquisitions. Out of those, 20 had 1 IP. Another 30 had another IP. Another 13 had a 3rd and another 20 had a 4th IP. That's more than half of the total.
Can you see the whois of the IP's? Either way thats no large amount (total) and does seem very fishy. You should have a reason to be suspicious. In your position I'd contact the company that sold you these.
I did a whois on the duplicate IPs and I see that almost all of the duplications are IPs that belong to AOL. It seems a bit convenient.
Ah, well AOL is known for sharing their IP's :/ Still if you have a bad gut feeling I wouldn't hesitate to contact the company (or person) you hired regarding this.