Affiliate Fraud

I believe that affiliate fraud and the absense of the right communication between affiliate managers in the industry serve as its largest handicap.

 

As manager of an affiliate network, I come across tons of fraud applications.  I'd say that for every legitimate application I receive, there are about 30 fraudulent apps.  I understand that it is an industry-wide problem from conversations wiht other AMs.

 

Our network is very selective of both advertisers and affiliates.  In order for us to work with good advertisers, we need to ensure that our affiliates are top notch, real affiliates, who send qualified leads and sales to them.

 

It depletes my resources to have to go through so many fraudulent applications.  I mean, we can usually process them pretty fast, knowing what signs to watch out for, but it's still tedious and downright annoying. It's difficult to be so picky, because we are essentially passing on some new folks on the scene who deserve a chance, but the risks that these newbie affiliates may be frauds is too great.

 

When a fraud penetrates a network, there is a spiral of extra work that is overwhelming. Tracking IP addresses, possibly dealing with a disgruntled advertiser, alerting your team, shutting down the affiliate, making sure you don't get reported for spamming or blocked. The list is pretty endless.

 

Although I can usually check some of the affiliate boards, it would be a pretty big step in the right direction if there were a one-stop reporsitory where all affiliate managers could check new applicants against a list of known frauds via whois, ip, name, mailing address, aliases, etc.

 

By bounding together affiliate managers may not be able to stop the fraud completely, but we would force these people to work harder to try and penetrate our networks.