Program Owners - How Often Do You Check Your Affiliate Base?

Im always seeing posts on various message boards about how some affiliate scammed a program for hundreds, sometimes even thousands of dollars in fraudulent sales and i must say, it really does make me laugh.

How often do these program owners go through their affiliate base to check that the people signing up to the programs arent fraudulent to begin with, that has been my #1 method of catching fraudulent affiliates on Condom Cash before they have even started to send traffic to any of the sites.

Just last week i caught a guy who signed up using someone elses domain name so that he looked 'legit' and after asking CCBill to double-check my findings, his acct was terminated and no sales are going to be made by that fraudster.

Why does it appear that most program owners only worry about fraud after the fact instead of putting some fraud control methods in place at the initial signup stage before a potentially fraudulent affiliate starts to send traffic or sales?

Regards,

Lee

Everytime we get a new affiliate I always try to figure out who they are and if they are legit...but sometimes I can't figure out who they are, so I just watch the account real close.

I agree that you need to be PROactive, rather than REactive.

- Michael

Lee,

We check every affiliate who joins our program to make sure they are real. So, I guess the answer is daily.

Bill

The unfortunate part is that ccbill lets the same people sign up over and over again after we've already pointed out that they're fraudsters. I really wish CCBill would do more of this checking, particularly since they ostensibly should have more info on these people than each individual sponsor does.

As far as why some program owners don't go over affiliates with fine tooth combs, the answer (for us at least) is that we don't have time. We are two people working at home making content featuring ourselves. That doesn't leave a lot of time to get all OCD over every single affiliate signup. I've no idea why large sponsors with staff don't, though.

I wish I had time to check that, to be honest.

But tell me..

Um.. what's the danger?

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Originally Posted by Jasun

I wish I had time to check that, to be honest.
But tell me..
Um.. what's the danger?

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I guess I am as confused as Jasun, because I'm not sure what is meant about 'fraud'. Isn't traffic traffic, and a sale a sale? As long as the purchase goes through the regular processes, how exactly would one perpetrate fraud? I must be a lot more naive than I give myself credit for...

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Originally Posted by wildwildwest

I guess I am as confused as Jasun, because I'm not sure what is meant about 'fraud'. Isn't traffic traffic, and a sale a sale? As long as the purchase goes through the regular processes, how exactly would one perpetrate fraud? I must be a lot more naive than I give myself credit for...

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in once case a few years back, one affiliate signed up for a program and sent them enough bad traffic over the next week that it resulted in over 150 Visa chargebacks for one of the following months

we (ccbill fraud) do what we can do, but its really up to the site owner to stay on top of the transactions for their business, they know their business best

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wildwildwest

I guess I am as confused as Jasun, because I'm not sure what is meant about 'fraud'. Isn't traffic traffic, and a sale a sale? As long as the purchase goes through the regular processes, how exactly would one perpetrate fraud? I must be a lot more naive than I give myself credit for...

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Sometimes people sign up as affiliates and then purchase memberships themselves with stolen credit cards.

Our main problem is people who spam search engines in really ugly ways with our domain names and redirect the traffic to us with their refcode. It's not the same as using stolen cc's of course, but it really sucks to get blacklisted by google because of these people, etc.

every morning we check new affiliate signups and if we cannot determine they are legit, we put an internal flag on their account and watch their traffic and sales closely. We usually discover if an affiliate is bad within the first week.

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Originally Posted by Chilihost

every morning we check new affiliate signups and if we cannot determine they are legit, we put an internal flag on their account and watch their traffic and sales closely. We usually discover if an affiliate is bad within the first week.

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And if you don't mind, can you say how often you discover bad affiliates? I''m just curious, but I can see how someone will sign up just to get a "discounted" membership, but this wouldn't seem to be a huge problem unless lots of people were doing it...? So "not legit" means they don't really have a website/blog to refer traffic from?

Its not common that people sign up to get a discounted membership. Its mostly fraudulent affiliates from various asian and eastern block countries that are cycling through stolen cc lists.