Oh, The Irony
There is a saying that presumably originates from parents who want to decrease the desire in their kids to act out in a way that jeopardizes others, applied most frequently to situations involving pranks. The inexact quote goes something like, “It’s only funny until someone does it to you.” It’s a version of “What goes around comes around,” which can in some situations interrupt the impulsive behavior and give a person about to do something potentially negative pause. Until such time that it actually happens to you, it’s pretty easy for the doer, or those at least ambivalent to the action, to look the other way. That is certainly the case here. Then it happened to two people directly in our space.
If you have a Facebook account chances are you’ve received something along the lines of, “Some Friend has invited you to the Event “Free iPad.” Were you in any other field you might have an inkling that something isn’t quite right, but you’re a performance marketer, so you know exactly what it means. It’s yet another affiliate looking for any angle to make a buck, and what better vehicle than the incentive promotion offers. They have the thickest skin, eyes that look the other way, and a long history of dealing with less than mainstream channels. The culprit’s here aren’t the incentive promotion guys but the idiots who have decided that hacking into people’s accounts is the way to do it. If we were looking for something to explain the affects of saturation in our article on “Demand Generation” this is it.
Open the email, and you’ll see something similar to this:
That will take you to:
They come in many iterations. Here’s another.
Not surprisingly, click on the URL, which is getting harder and harder for the affiliates to sneak in there, and it will go to the familiar:
Of course, if you trace the hops, it doesn’t go directly to the incentive promotion site. There is a layer or two of plausible deniability built in.
It’s not just events. Other iterations of the scam include posts into the feed. They don’t go into the inbox like an event invite does, though:
The best of all, though, is the chat hack. In this example, incentive promotion is off the hook, but you’ll never guess what type of offer is used. Maybe you will, especially if you said mobile. The text of the conversation goes something like this:
1:53pm
hey, I just scored 115 on this quiz [url], Tell me what you get
2:14pm
yo, are you busy?
2:17pm Me
?
2:17pm Jake
I want you to try something real quick
ok, try this test and lemme know what you get.. i can’t get over like a 110, its ridiculous [url]
As you’ll see from the image below, the person was actually trying to share his amazing score.
How much volume are we ultimately talking about here? It’s hard to say. They certainly have been effective at getting to various people’s accounts, and Facebook has done a pretty solid job of recognizing when accounts have been hacked and disabling the links in the event. Old timers will find something vaguely familiar about what is going on – incentivized advertising + social media traffic + hacking. Ultimately, it’s not a question of volume or just how much money they will owe or possible jail time they will do once caught. It’s the damage it does to the cpa network industry, and of course that damage is far beyond the monetary impact. We should be ashamed. Smirk in private, but in public be pissed. Go figure that the affiliates in question are from Florida and China respectively.
