Fraud 2.0
As though straight out of some biblical parable, for whatever reason, a percentage of those engaging in an activity will do it the good way while a percentage will do it the bad way. In sports or academics, they call it cheating. In our industry, they call it fraud, and despite that it can lead to a loss of revenue, relationships, even jail, it still exists. And, no amount of lamenting or commenting that these wonderful misguided souls could do so much good if they just chose to apply their efforts to more accepted and law abiding forms of productivity, it won’t go way. Worst perhaps, it only continues to evolve and become more sophisticated, just as their counterparts in the less dark arts continue to improve their services. Take spyware for example. Those behind one of the newest strains have the skill to excel just about anywhere; they could have gone to Google, had their food, dry cleaning, and options. Instead, they seem content to earn millions by letting everyone know indiscriminately of their gender or age that their male genitalia need enhancement, and continue to innovate new ways of spelling that would confound even those in charge of naming Web 2.0 companies. While our space and particular brand of direct / affiliate marketing tends not to deal with promoting oral enhancements, we certainly can’t escape the impact, perhaps wrath of those engaging in fraud. I know I wouldn’t want to run a click based business, and much of the fraud in our space focuses on those perpetrating against click based businesses. Given that our industry revolves around actions, not clicks, it has always felt that we had less exposure to the dark side, and to some extent I think that holds true. Unfortunately, we see now that this doesn’t quite hold true, as a new type of fraud has begun to rear its head. It’s being called the Indy virus, a somewhat politically incorrect name based on the role that those in India inadvertently or perhaps knowingly play.
If you wanted to make some relatively easy money, unethically, it unfortunately doesn’t take much. Sign up for an ad network, especially one that has incentive promotion offers and do the following - enter an email address, a reasonable one. Do this across five such offers, perhaps two to five times daily. That will give you fifteen to twenty conversions, which at $1.25 will mean around twenty dollars daily. Then find one or two lead generation offers, perhaps an auto finance or insurance offer. Fill out one of those every other day, etc. Before you know it, you could end up earning $500 to $1000 per month in extra income. And, given that the average larger size affiliate network has hundreds of people earning several hundred dollars per month, you could slide by unnoticed for a while. The relative ease of pulling off low volume fraud is the very reason why networks tend not to allow affiliates from dollar weak countries where that $1000 could mean a real income. The person might have a legitimate website, but the risk is simply too great to take a chance. And, while $500 to $1000 can add up, the ambitious folks want more, and they know they can’t do it alone. This used to mean writing scripts that would fill out these email only forms or go through an address book and enter real but nonetheless bogus data into data only offers. With volume comes scrutiny, and the beauty of offers like the incentive promotion one comes in the form of relatively real time feedback on performance. An email address or zip doesn’t make the marketer any money. Only actions throughout the flow do, so if an advertiser sees a bunch of conversions coming from a certain source id that yielded no real revenue they can spot fraud fairly quickly. In other words, you can’t quite teach a machine to be human, but you can teach a human, and here is where we get into the heart of the Indy virus.
Pages: 1 2 next page »
Article Sponsor
More Opinions
Reader Comments.
No comments yet
Leave a Comment
Features
- With Ads, Pretty Is as Pretty Does November 21st 2008
- Holiday Hootenanny: Win the Ad WAR November 20th 2008
- When Boomers, Gen Y Collide November 20th 2008
- How Google Is Jeopardizing Search Biz November 19th 2008
- Click Fraud To Shape Ad Decisions in 2009 November 18th 2008
Latest News
- Goodmail Reels in $20M November 21st 2008
- Yahoo Sells Off Shopping Site at Discount November 21st 2008
- Paper-Loving Paramount Goes Digi November 21st 2008
- Google Personalizes Search Results November 21st 2008
- Verizon Staff Hacked Into Old Obama Account November 21st 2008
- IAB: Q3 Raked in $5.9B November 21st 2008
- Ad Spend Forecast Down Overall, Online Safe for Now November 20th 2008
- Will Bandwidth Limits Kill the Video Ad? November 20th 2008
Spotlight
Turn VP: Ad Network Shakeout “Inevitable”ADOTAS EXCLUSIVE – Turn bills itself as the world’s first Smart Market for online advertising. Turn’s VP of product and [...] more...
Reader Favorites
Classifieds
Most Commented
- Targeting Is the Ad Network "Killer App" (7)
- Study: Blogs Beat Social Networks on Purchase Influence (5)
- Vengence is Mine Saith Ballmer (4)
- Marketing Secrets of an Online “Lurker” (3)
- Self-Serve Ad Exchange: This Century's Strowger Switch? (3)
- Federal Bailout Proposed for Online Ad Industry (3)
- What Obama's Win Means for Advertisers (3)
- The Coming eRevolution in Online Marketing (2)
