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

[wildwildwest]

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

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...

[corvett]

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...

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

[Trixie]

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...

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.

[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.

[wildwildwest]

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.

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?

[Chilihost]

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.