Has your business been affected by the following?

[tinawhitehead]

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Through our close links with our Merchants and the scrutiny which ALL applications receive, we have uncovered a highly sophisticated gang of manipulative and professional fraudsters.

Overseas Affiliate rings are targeting Merchant programmes with high PPA commissions.

We all know that certain Merchants, when pre-arranged, do accept manually input applications however this group of scammers are submitting information where the application content is correct but the ‘client’ concerned has not applied, and in some cases does not, and never has, have access to the internet.

Not only is this detrimental to the Merchant and Network involved, but also to every Affiliate worldwide. This type of perfidious activity is totally unacceptable and could lead to a decline, and eventually the demise, of online marketing.

This needs to stop!

Please PM me if you feel that you have affected by this scurrilous activity so that we can share the information that we have.

Tina

[pricethat]

This is nothing new tina and although there are some good eggs around who want to help stop it a lot of larger networks are not interested as they say that it is the merchants job to validate the sales/leads and if they dont that is more money for them (I heard it with my own ears).

But it is not limited to affiliate marketing, where there is an opportunity of getting money out of a system then there will always be crooks, scallywags and fraudsters that will try and abuse it or look for loopholes. The added so called anonamous nature of the net will only lead to an increase of it.

It does affect affiliates and it does endanger certain aspects of affiliate marketing, pay per click deals are on of those areas and to be fair you may only be paying for leads but the reason you are paying for leads and not just every click that we send to your site is because the ppc system is just too open for abuse, whereas you can argue about leads or the quality/origin of them. My feeling is in some ways it does actually validate good affiliates and good networks as companies like you need to generate leads and as such will go to environments that are safer/less fraud and merchants will take more notice of affiliates that generate good clean business for fear of wandering off into dirty waters ...... or thats the plan anyway...shortly before global domination and all that.

[Shane]

"the application content is correct but the ‘client’ concerned has not applied"

try buying loan leads from india .. same scenario.. you're sold details for people that have no interest and have had no one contact them regarding a loan at all.

not a big stretch of the imagination to imagine someone buying semi legit leads or totally inventing their own based on name and address details froma 192 type cd you can download anywhere online and then hitting multiple merchants on multiple networks filling them all in is it ..

[Brendon]

>> Overseas Affiliate rings are targeting Merchant programmes with high PPA commissions.

LOL, you seeing China, India, or both?

[Mike_M]

The way to stop this is for the merchant to run a small trial with an affiliate before agreeing to any high volume arrangement.

A trial helps both merchant and affiliate - the merchant gets to see the quality of the affiliate apps and the affiliate gets to see how good the merchant is at validating/paying.

[steveaich]

This is nothing new tina and although there are some good eggs around who want to help stop it a lot of larger networks are not interested as they say that it is the merchants job to validate the sales/leads and if they dont that is more money for them (I heard it with my own ears).

Name and shame, this hurts everyone and the networks really need to be at the forefront of combating it.

[tinawhitehead]

Mmmmm lets see!!
China, Cuba, Singapore, USA, Canada, India and the UK!!!!!

[Gavinio]

www.affiliatefairplay.com

[tinawhitehead]

www.affiliatefairplay.com

Thanks for that.

[tinawhitehead]

"the application content is correct but the ‘client’ concerned has not applied"

try buying loan leads from india .. same scenario.. you're sold details for people that have no interest and have had no one contact them regarding a loan at all.

not a big stretch of the imagination to imagine someone buying semi legit leads or totally inventing their own based on name and address details froma 192 type cd you can download anywhere online and then hitting multiple merchants on multiple networks filling them all in is it ..

Lets just say the same 'clients' applied to 2 or 3 different merchants on our network, whos links were on totally different affiliate websites, within seconds of each other with different ip addresses!