July 10, 2019

*-- Online Affiliate Fraud Tweets --*

by: Jaffer Ali @Jaffer22915438

1) Online Affiliate Fraud I am an advocate for entrepreneurs and not trying to sell you anything. Every industry is filled with frauds and charlatans. Vendors perpetuate fraud across industries. Hope this helps.

2) Affiliate sales are projected to be $7 billion by 2020. Yuuge business that has the coding brigade figuring clever ways to steal your money. Do NOT expect affiliate exchanges like Commission Junction, Link Share or Share A Sale to eliminate fraud.

3) Beware of affiliates *hijacking orders*. This is done different ways. Cookie stuffing is one of the main ways. Link to understand the practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cookie_stuffing

4) Example: People visit website to purchase, but search 4 coupons at coupon site. There may or may not be a real discount coupon but the website lured you with the promise & drop a cookie & when you check out, coupon site gets affiliate commission without generating the traffic.

5) Toolbar Fraud: My company, PulseTV had a toolbar affiliate that gave cash back to consumers. Our customers who had the toolbar already installed automatically received cash back from the affiliate. How?

6) Toolbar changed source of the visit to be THEIR website. Any order from existing customers AUTOMATICALLY gave the affiliate credit. It cost us $17,000 in one month. Affiliate used Commission Junction which we terminated as they did not care. They make money w/fraud too.

7) Email SPAMMERS-Few of these actually host websites & send tons of traffic. They take links & negotiate a deal. even if they have a website-direct traffic to you. Millions of emails sent. We were shut down due to affiliate spam in 2003 after generating $500,000 in sales in 1 month.

8) Affiliates generating leads can host a page, collect info and post to your lead form. They then sell the same information to multiple people, including your competitors. Only host your own lead forms and make sure leads come from different IPs.

9) CPC Fraud: Yuuuuge fraud business. Bots are responsible for at least 50% of the clicks. We were arbitraging clicks from a network & discovered 90%+ fraud. Told agency who bought clicks from us. They did not care. Client wanted to inflate traffic numbers before selling company.

10) For in-house affiliate programs, beware of customers signing up to become an affiliate just to get personal discounts. We had one customer buying weekly and getting affiliate commissions. All products just went to his home.

11) Data breaches compound affiliate fraud. Stolen credit cards are used by fraudulent affiliates.

12) Orders outside US are subject to higher % of fraud. We stopped selling to Pakistan completely as 20% of orders were fraud and energy not worth the money for the 80% good orders.

13) Before doing any marketing, work from the tails first. This means studying fraud FIRST. Unfortunately, we did not do this over the past 20 years and have been torched many times. Hope this helps.

Jaffer Ali is a serial entrepreneur and currently the CEO of PulseTV, an e-commerce company. He recently started his ninth entrepreneurial adventure; TrySERA.com, a data company that identifies website visitors and allows marketers to re-market to them via email.

Original Article: Online Affiliate Fraud Tweets