Musical Affiliates
Affiliate Networks have always been plagued with fraud. Most of the times foreigners try to sign up and either run very little traffic and ‘fly under the radar’ or run a massive amount for a short time and in both cases hope they get paid.
Most Affiliate Networks have a system for researching any new affiliate before they are approved to run traffic. This typically includes checking out the information that the prospective affiliate provided on their application for discrepancies. Checking the IP address they signed up from matches their physical address or is at least close to it. Calling the phone number they provided to make sure it is a real human that signed up. The list of items goes on, and typically the person researching the affiliate can get a pretty good idea of what the applying affiliate’s potential is along with whether they are a good fit for the network.
What happens when the affiliate industry gets wise to the fraudulent traffic coming from ‘affiliates’ in countries like China, India and others? They start hiring people in the US and Canada to sign up for them using fake names, addresses and then take over the accounts.
Lately this has been happening in limited ways, although the more it helps the foreign affiliates the more you can expect will start following suit.
I have had the frustration of dealing with this first hand in the past few months. At first it was an isolated instance although over the past month or so we have been getting many signups that are clearly not genuine or not signed up with the intention of running any traffic themselves.
While dealing with the fraud traffic one affiliate that slipped by early on ran I have been able to figure out some of the signs that the prospective affiliate is not a good approval for your network.
First, look at the affiliates name. A lot of the affiliates we have caught as paid sign ups use two first names for the first and last name. Names like John Scott or Kevin William to name a few that have been used.
Second, look at the application, these ‘affiliates’ that are paid signups typically use form fillers. Our form allows for two different email addresses to be used, so if both the email addresses are the same I can count on it possibly being a paid signup.
Third, compare the physical address in the application with the IP address they signed up from. A lot of times they will be in the same city which is great, although a closer look at who owns the IP will reveal it is a server within a company or a server hosting company. This means the ‘affiliate’ signed up using a proxy or going through another server. Why would any valid affiliate do this? They don’t and they would not. Most real affiliates sign up from their house or their place of employment. I had a paid sign up that I caught that signed up using an Herbal Life server. He claimed I didn’t know what I was talking about that he had nothing to do with Herbal Life and that he signed up from his house. The bottom line is the IP address if your system records it when they sign up, does not lie.
Fourth, look at their billing information a lot of them don’t fill in a social security number. They use all ones or something obviously fake. This is because they don’t want you knowing who they are. They don’t want any of this to be traced back to them. They just want to get paid for signing up and handing over the account.
Lastly, once they sign up, they will contact you. They will hound you and tell you how they want to be approved this week so they can get running by the weekend. They will tell you they run all kinds of traffic. They will also make it sound like they are in a specific niche. They will tell you, “Right now I am doing great with dating offers on social media, although I am looking to expand in to insurance, health offers, one field submits and biz ops”. They will tell you how they are building their email list from their blog or website and the website they give you is a melting pot of every type of offer imaginable thrown up there that even my unsuspecting Grandmother would not feel comfortable clicking on any of the offers.
We have also found these people are getting smarter and smarter, like creating a website to look like an affiliate network. I mean what new affiliate manager at XYZ network doesn’t want a network to be assigned to them. So they see it’s a network and want to approve them right away. Although if you start to dig deeper in to their so-called network you will find references to the network they stole the copy from, you will notice that the form on the sign up page doesn’t work and the site and all the pages, including the sign up form is built completely from basic HTML with out any references to any type of database.
Keep in mind, not any one of the above will tell you 100% the applicant is a paid signup looking to hand off their account to a foreign affiliate so that they can run fraud traffic to you, although when you start combining the items above and you use common sense, all the planets align and you can get a feel for who is a paid sign up and who is not.
If you have the misfortune of approving one of these paid signups on to your network you will notice the typing style and ‘attitude’ of the affiliate will change. They will go from the aggressive ‘want to be approved’ affiliate to the very courteous and often grammatically incorrect affiliate. They will change their payment info sometimes, although don’t expect this. Also watch for the very low volume traffic. They will fly under the radar and look to get paid quietly.
An affiliate network constantly has to deal with fraud. It is just part of being a network. Private networks are not hit as hard by fraud because they don’t just approve any one. The paid signups target more of the private networks though. The look to get in places they can’t almost like it is a challenge, although I think they believe they will get away with more on a small network because the people are not as smart or well equipped to figure them out.
I always use common sense when approving or disapproving affiliates. If it feels like they are fraud, and you have checked all the above and have found things out of place, chances are they are a fraud sign up and affiliate.
