Cheating PPS Programs

[Dzinerbear]

Hi guys,

I'm putting together a proposal for a PPS program and I'm just wondering if you guys can shed some light on what ways webmasters try to or do cheat PPS programs?

Thanks
Michael

[basschick]

the ones that come to me offhand:

have friends sign up
use stolen credit cards
tell their surfers how to join and charge back
tell their surfers to join for the trial and cancel
offer their surfers an incentive to join the site
advertise content that the site doesn't offer

i saw one site that actually told the surfers to join, cancel, wait three months and then charge back

[Dzinerbear]

Thanks basschick, you're up early. (And thanks for your feedback in the TGP thread.)

So how does one going about policing this stuff, it's just a matter to watching your affiliates closely for anything odd? Or do the big programs like NATS help you out in this regard?

Michael

[basschick]

you're welcome - and i'm up late

programs like NATS and executivestats(and i assume MPA, but i don't know it for a fact) have some fraud control stuff built in .

keep an eye out for affiliates with spectacular conversion ratios - i had one guy who sent 43 sales from 111 hits. amazingly enough, turned out he was using stolen cards.

also look for patterns in usernames/passwords across all or most of the signups by any suspicious affiliate. that same guy who sent the 43 sales had another red flag that epoch support showed me. all the usernames were numbers only and the passwords were random. epoch pointed out to me that most members use words for both username and password, but virtually always for password.

also you can keep an eye on the referring urls for sales easily in ccbill. someone who has no ref url on most or all of his/her sales is worth looking into. sometimes it's just the script their sending traffic from, but sometimes it's because they're not actually sending any traffic.

i'm falling asleep so i hope this makes sense...

Thanks basschick, you're up early. (And thanks for your feedback in the TGP thread.)

So how does one going about policing this stuff, it's just a matter to watching your affiliates closely for anything odd? Or do the big programs like NATS help you out in this regard?

Michael

[Becky]

Another thing you can do is match up all sales info (email, IP) with the webmaster info you collected when they joined your program. Also, watch their chargeback percentages. If they get high, you'll want to at least talk to the webmaster to find out how they are promoting your sites to see what might cause the chargebacks. If no response, TMF the webmaster

[IntenseCash.com]

Besides the normal fraud here is a couple rare cases. I have seen one guy somehow signup through all 900 billing but I caught him. All the calls were made from California but I am not quite sure how he managed to do it. I terminated his account and he made a huge fuss about it and posted on webmaster boards that I was screwing him and how horrible IntenseCash was. Well after checking out his site more I found out he was also using stolen content from my site. Well I joined his site and he had all stolen content including child porn. So I had his host shut him down and reported him to the authorities. I am not exactly sure what happened to him but hopefully some jail time. I think he deserves a stupid criminal award since if he hasn't made the fuss with being terminated I would of never joined his site and found the child porn.

I also had another guy a long time ago hack into the server and actually steal signups here and there from other webmasters. What a mess that we caught but never went after the guy and lost about 3k.

We have it in our terms that any fraud caught and we will post their info anywhere we please and we will sue them and they will pay the legal fees.
We all pay for fraud somehow and I would sure like to fight it anyway I can.

Mark