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How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison

businessinsider.com

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Re: How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison

#41

Post by unreal37 »

Matsta wrote: post #27

Ahh this brings back some memories. The articles mentions the guy who made the cooking stuffing software. He was pretty active on a private part of a forum I'm still part of. Anyway eBay went after the forum as well, and promptly deleted his account and all the threads mentioning eBay. They also moved their servers offshore and deleted pretty much every thread that mentioned eBay in it. I do remember he wrote a massi…

I also tend to believe that these companies sanctioned this activity until they were against it. A year after they claim to have started investigating it, they invite one of the guys to a private dinner where he is the only non-eBay employee in attendance, and treat him like a king. Its a contradiction.

Very interesting stuff. That must have been a fun forum at the time, when easy money was to be made like this. Thanks for the insight.

Re: How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison

#42

Post by kreilly »

curiousdannii wrote: post #2

"So eBay installed a tiny “gif” file on its homepage. A gif is simply an image file. This one was so tiny no one could see it. It sat there invisibly."

I suspect this was 1x1 image pixel similar to what is routine practice in online advertising to track site visits.

Re: How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison

#43

Post by nzealand »

smackfu wrote: post #17
AznHisoka wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually there's a bit of truth in it. The dirty secret is that 90% of affiliate revenue is generated by coupon sites. For the most part retailers are giving away money that they probably would've generated any way w/o the affiliate.

Really? I would think the big dog for affiliate payments is Amazon, and they don't really have much in the way of coupons.

My wife represented someone busted for being an Amazon cookie stuffer.

He was essentially a script kiddie who paid for the script. He wasn't as successful. I think Amazon devotes more resources to tracking this kind of fraud.

Re: How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison

#44

Post by [deleted] »

Proleps wrote: post #37
rayiner wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tricking people for profit is the definition of fraud. It says a sad thing about the industry that shady practices like that are considered important enough that it would be "scary" to have to abstain from them.

> Tricking people for profit is the definition of fraud. This would make 90% of all applications/websites fraud. Most free(gratis) Windows software tricks you into installing spyware & toolbars. Almost every app on your phone tricks you into giving away personal data. Almost every website tricks you into being tracked across multiple websites.

[deleted]

Re: How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison

#45

Post by unreal37 »

Sujan wrote: post #34
curiousdannii wrote: post #2

"So eBay installed a tiny “gif” file on its homepage. A gif is simply an image file. This one was so tiny no one could see it. It sat there invisibly."

Does anyone get what the author actually means in the "invisible gif" paragraph? Makes no sense to me how this could actually have helped to decide if the traffic was real or malicious :/

So the accused were placing an unrelated widget on other people's sites and adding the eBay cookie as part of the payload. The user never actually was directed to eBay.

So say eBay notices they are serving 1 million cookies a month to users, but only have 50,000 visitors relating to those people on their homepage. That's how they know this was cookie stuffing and not legitimate traffic.

Re: How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison

#46

Post by unreal37 »

thetrumanshow wrote: post #8
ianhawes wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iframe of the affiliate link. eBay sets the required cookies.

Wait, so they just rendered an iframe of a random product on ebay that contained their affiliate information on a bunch of widgets they hosted ... and this lands you in prison? Lets imagine I publish an eBay widget (I don't) to promote products I think people should buy. Lets say the widget just renders products in my sidebar. Lets say thousands of blogs then install this. Would I be then bound for prison? I'm strugg…

What lands you in prison is not the cookie or the iframe.

What lands you there is defrauding eBay of $20 million.

Re: How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison

#47

Post by corresation »

unreal37 wrote: post #41
Matsta wrote: post #27

Ahh this brings back some memories. The articles mentions the guy who made the cooking stuffing software. He was pretty active on a private part of a forum I'm still part of. Anyway eBay went after the forum as well, and promptly deleted his account and all the threads mentioning eBay. They also moved their servers offshore and deleted pretty much every thread that mentioned eBay in it. I do remember he wrote a massi…

I also tend to believe that these companies sanctioned this activity until they were against it. A year after they claim to have started investigating it, they invite one of the guys to a private dinner where he is the only non-eBay employee in attendance, and treat him like a king. Its a contradiction. Very interesting stuff. That must have been a fun forum at the time, when easy money was to be made like this. Than…

I also tend to believe that these companies sanctioned this activity until they were against it.

Why? It provided absolutely no value to them. Actually worse, it cost them affiliate fees on sales that rightfully would have been affiliate fee free.

There is no scenario where it makes sense that eBay (edit: wow originally wrote Amazon) would endorse this.

they invite one of the guys to a private dinner where he is the only non-eBay employee in attendance, and treat him like a king.

Have you considered that maybe his sense of truth is a little skewed?

Re: How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison

#48

Post by rwmj »

Proleps wrote: post #37
rayiner wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tricking people for profit is the definition of fraud. It says a sad thing about the industry that shady practices like that are considered important enough that it would be "scary" to have to abstain from them.

> Tricking people for profit is the definition of fraud. This would make 90% of all applications/websites fraud. Most free(gratis) Windows software tricks you into installing spyware & toolbars. Almost every app on your phone tricks you into giving away personal data. Almost every website tricks you into being tracked across multiple websites.

Putting people in prison for doing this stuff sounds fine to me.

Re: How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison

#49

Post by noonespecial »

Sujan wrote: post #34
curiousdannii wrote: post #2

"So eBay installed a tiny “gif” file on its homepage. A gif is simply an image file. This one was so tiny no one could see it. It sat there invisibly."

Does anyone get what the author actually means in the "invisible gif" paragraph? Makes no sense to me how this could actually have helped to decide if the traffic was real or malicious :/

For the hack to work, the victim's computer had to get a cookie from ebay. The widget caused this cookie to get downloaded to the victims computer, but only this cookie. Normal visits from legitimate users get everything on the page. Adding a small invisible file meant that a normal user would get this file as well as the cookie but the malicious widget would only grab the cookie.

Finding out how many IP's were legit vs bogus was then a simple matter of going through the http logs making sure all gets of the cookie had matching gets of the gif. Cookie gets without gif gets were fraud.

Re: How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison

#50

Post by unreal37 »

Proleps wrote: post #37
rayiner wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tricking people for profit is the definition of fraud. It says a sad thing about the industry that shady practices like that are considered important enough that it would be "scary" to have to abstain from them.

> Tricking people for profit is the definition of fraud. This would make 90% of all applications/websites fraud. Most free(gratis) Windows software tricks you into installing spyware & toolbars. Almost every app on your phone tricks you into giving away personal data. Almost every website tricks you into being tracked across multiple websites.

90%? Are you sure you're not exaggerating that a little bit?

Yes, tricking people for profit IS fraud. Tracking you across the web like Adsense does is NOT fraud. The act of stealing someone's contact list like Path does is NOT fraud either (but may be a different crime).

And very very little of web sites or applications engage in fraud. The world does a pretty good job of blocking these things, the way Chrome won't even let you go to a web site that has been known to deliver viruses. And yes the FBI should arrest these people.

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