Cheating an affiliate marketing Program.

[Gajandra D]

There are many ways that affiliates use to cheat or go around the rules stated in the terms and conditions of the program. Since most programs do not have a clear strategy in detecting and cleaning house of these bad apples they continue to wreak havoc for the advertiser. If this fails they move on to the next victim so to speak.

1) Sometimes merchants are click frauded by their own competitors who exhaust their ad budget.

2) Dishonest affiliates who intend to artificially inflate their revenues.

3) Same goal but different ways to get at the objective. Affiliates, networks and merchants might be competing at the same game.

4) Using combination of keywords to get around the restrictions.

You may go here to get a clearer picture.

[David Tan]

Yeah, and this is just PPC advertising. Won't work much with PPA. By the way, affiliatebot is PPA. Hopefully no one thinks that we're promoting this. In fact, PPA merchants can take note of these methods and develop their own methods to detect frauds.

One method is to have 100-500 different email accounts that are spread out there to be spammed. Then check all the mails in Outlook and do a search for the keywords. See if their ad pops up in the most fraudulent manner.