My takeaway from this is: stay the hell away from affiliate marketing.
No just don't commit fraud.
How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison
51–60 of 96 posts
Re: How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
With cookie-stuffing the cookie is normally "generated" by loading a page in an invisible iframe. The loaded page is actually the same you would land on if you clicked normal advertising, with "everything on the page" - including an invisible gif. Visibility or Invisibility of the iframe doesn't change anything to the loading of this file. That's why it doesn't make sense to me.
Or did they use another method to place the cookie I don't know about?
Re: How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
So eBay is cutting him a check for $1 million to $2 million per MONTH. This equates to $2 million to $4 million a month in profits for eBay that they share 50% with the affiliate.
When his traffic drops, the affiliate manager calls him and asks to do whatever it takes to get his numbers back up. It looks bad on her. "Why is affiliate revenue down 20% this month?" her boss asks.
She doesn't even CARE that it's crappy traffic. She needs affiliate revenue to rise and rise every month no matter what.
Every person at eBay doesn't have to act in the best interests of eBay, just in the best interests of their job at eBay. I'll believe that there were dozens of people at eBay who were encouraging him to do whatever he could to get his numbers up, no matter if it was white hat, grey hat or black hat. They didn't care.
And then suddenly one day someone cared.
I'm not saying its right to defraud them. I'm saying I can believe they condoned it at one point.
Re: How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5651510 - just doesn't work that way afaik.
Re: How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? I would think the big dog for affiliate payments is Amazon, and they don't really have much in the way of coupons.
Amazon has a 24-hour cookie. So you get paid even if someone clicks on your link and buys something else later in the day. I wouldn't be surprised if this accounted for a huge majority of their affiliate payouts. Cases where someone buys a product directly from Amazon after reading a review are a minority, imo.
I can remember talking with the Amazon Affiliate people in a conference call 10 years ago. They have been leaders in this game a long time, and I can believe they have tightened their security on fraud as tight as it can go.
Re: How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
So eBay is cutting him a check for $1 million to $2 million per MONTH. This equates to $2 million to $4 million a month in profits for eBay that they share 50% with the affiliate. When his traffic drops, the affiliate manager calls him and asks to do whatever it takes to get his numbers back up. It looks bad on her. "Why is affiliate revenue down 20% this month?" her boss asks. She doesn't even CARE that it's crappy…
Saying "one rogue account rep sanctioned this" (which even that I deeply doubt) is quite a world removed from saying that the company sanctioned it, which was your original statement.
Re: How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison
#57Shocked to learn that Brian Dunning has done this. I've been listening to his Skeptoid podcast for years. I always pictured someone of modest or middle class means because he solicits donations to help keep the podcast going. I didn't think he was also making millions from fraud. Ironically, 'consumer frauds' is one of things he has listed on his website as a target of his skeptical inquiry. Found this blog post with…
Wow, that's a whopper. (the bit about cookie stuffing being normal)
As I understand it, they would do something like this: on every 1 of 10,000 page views (to Digital Point's forums, or other sites), they would embed a page from eBay (as the source of an image), which had their affiliate code in it. The visitor was none the wiser.
Keep in mind digital point gets a ton of traffic. Though only a small percentage had a cookie dropped, it added up to many.
Purely through coincidence, some of these people would later buy something on eBay in the next 30 days, earning them a commission. Its hard to argue they earned the commission, TOS or otherwise.
Re: How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.
Well, it provided value to ebay's affiliate manager who could boast about how much revenue his affiliate program drives in. In a big corporation there are many factions. :)
Re: How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison
#59Ahh 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…
it's Ockham's razor time:
Cookie-stuffing results in a significant cost to eBay and no additional revenue. No sane company would sanction it (beyond maybe turning a blind eye to someone doing the odd bit of cookie-stuffing if they earned most of their commission on driving real sales). Of course, plenty of sane companies that have departments that don't talk to each other about ongoing investigations and sales guys focused on next month's commission...
The program managers' role was to encourage an apparently very effective affiliate marketer to drive more real traffic to eBay, whether that was because they believed most of his referrals were genuine, thought they could persuade him to switch strategy to actually doing real marketing for eBay or simply adopting a business-as-usual approach whilst waiting for the fraud investigation to conclude. Either way, by his own admission Hogan wasn't remotely interested in investing in actually driving traffic to eBay even if they provided additional cash to support it...
Re: How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
So eBay is cutting him a check for $1 million to $2 million per MONTH. This equates to $2 million to $4 million a month in profits for eBay that they share 50% with the affiliate. When his traffic drops, the affiliate manager calls him and asks to do whatever it takes to get his numbers back up. It looks bad on her. "Why is affiliate revenue down 20% this month?" her boss asks. She doesn't even CARE that it's crappy…
Obviously eBay thought that the traffic is compliant. They didn't know that this was just cookie stuffing and that the sales they were paying to him for would happen anyway. When his affiliate sales declined, affiliate manager would of course be worried and try to re-engage the affiliate. But how stupid eBay affiliate managers could be if they didn't notice that actual sales volume was the same whether with his traffic or without. Well, maybe not completely stupid after all, if they finally had some grey matter to realise something fishy (and so simple) was going on..