Might have shady affiliate. Suggestions?

[PFLJayden]

I have an affiliate who signed up. The affiliate then clicked on his own link and purchased a non-recurring 30-day membership. It's now been 4 days. He has not sent any clicks and of course no new signups.

Being that I've never seen this before, It's raised my suspicion. His website does have a few banners however many of his blog posts contain 1-2 images. I want to say that he's a pic collector. But he does have a few links on his site.

He doesn't type very good english. We've emailed back and forth a couple of times once I seen this, I questioned the affiliate, "How are you promoting us?" He replied, "I promote you on my site." The next email, I said "HOW are you promoting us?" He replied, "I tell you my site."

What would you do?

[HunkyLuke]

Is it against your terms to join one of your sites under their own affiliate account? If yes, its clear cut - they violated your terms and should be warned and/or closed.

[Bec]

If his English isn't that good, perhaps he bought a pass to see what you have for his surfers and to grab some images? Can you tell at all how savvy he is about using sponsor content from his site? Maybe write again and offer to help him sort out better ways to market your program.

[PFLJayden]

Okay, the affiliate is legit.

I really do not wish to mention the affiliate details.

He was a pirater. He was one of those we talked out of being a pirater and turning his act around. He's doing it I'm so proud

He doesn't know the affiliate side. He doesn't know how to promote sites. After working with him hands on for about 3 hours today, he's certainly a work in progress but is certainly trying.

He signed up to get a look at our members area so that he could get screen captures and be able to write descriptions about our site and such.

I did tell him to not do this again (signing up under his affiliate link). He should have asked us for a temp password and we would have given that to him.

He's an okay guy.

[raymor]

Good to hear that he turned out to be OK. I was thinking that ONE join to test things didn't sound too bad. I know a lot of affiliates will do one join to see if it registers in their stats. So long as you don't have a Russian webmaster using a British CC (stolen), I wouldn't think that would be too suspicious.

[StunnerJesse]

When you say he was a pirate, did he already pirate your content and that's how you originally became aware of him and started talking to him?

If a pirate signed up to a site through their own affiliate link, I'd be worried that they're doing it to grab more content to pirate... and then wants to get some of their money back via the affiliate commission.

If he'd already pirated the content in the past though I'd figure he couldn't do much more harm.

There certainly are pirates that have righted their ship and have decided to be good. Hopefully this is one of them.

Still somebody to keep a close eye on, I'd say...