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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

#61

Post by unreal37 »

Sujan wrote: post #54
unreal37 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think this description is accurate. It makes no sense for an invisible iframe to display the entire ebay homepage to the user - people would notice 100's of server connections and an extra 1MB download for a page view. More likely they found the one Javascript file on ebay that creates the cookie, and ONLY loads that Javascript.

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

#62

Post by kybernetyk »

Sujan wrote: post #52
noonespecial wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 plac…

You could trigger cookie setting with the img tag. http://affiliate-link-to-ebay.com> would set the cookie on most browsers.

I don't know if that works anymore because my "affiliate" time is well long over but I guess this loophole has been fixed long since.

IIRC iframe was a little problematic with some websites as they had frame break out scripts [1] - so you had to be creative.

The golden wild west times ... I somehow miss them. Money was lying on the information super highway - you just had to pick it up ;)

[1] something like http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/framebreak.shtml

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

#63

Post by unreal37 »

notahacker wrote: post #59
unreal37 wrote: post #41

Earlier 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…

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 f…

I agree. The interests of an individual may not always 100% align with the overall interests of the company. That's true at eBay as it's true at almost every company out there.

I am more interested, for example, at making the clients I talk to on a day to day basis happy with my work than I am on the exact profit margin my company makes every time I bill an hour of my time to that account. I see my job as making my clients happy, not making my company's stockholders richer. Hopefully one leads to the other.

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

#64

Post by a5seo »

notahacker wrote: post #59
unreal37 wrote: post #41

Earlier 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…

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 f…

Agree. The reality is that the people managing the affiliate programs aren't that knowledgeable. Any encouragement was just blind rah rah boostering, with no comprehension of how they were driving commissions.

If anything, this just shows how clueless big companies are about online marketing "techniques".

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

#65

Post by a5seo »

AJ007 wrote: post #23
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.

The dirty secret is that 90% of e-commerce affiliate revenue is generated by coupon toolbars. Its like what Shawn Hogan did, except it involves every single e-commerce affiliate program instead of just one.

Not toolbars. 3 words: Retail Me Not. They are going public this year w/ a whisper valuation of $2 Billion.

Search any merchant + coupons and they are there. It's like printing money.

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

#66

Post by unreal37 »

corresation wrote: post #56
unreal37 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not saying the rep was "rogue". I'm saying eBay set up their affiliate program to encourage affiliate sales "no matter what" and then in 2008 they started caring for quality of affiliate links when they didn't care before. Let me try this another way.

There are companies out there that pay salespeople a percentage of total revenue they get customers to buy, regardless if the order is profitable for the company. So salespeople offer 50%-75% discounts for their products to customers in order to get customers to buy, the salesperson makes the commission off the full retail price before discount, and the company loses on every sale with -75% gross margin. It's a fast-track to bankruptcy. No sane company would do this right? That company was called Ecomom. It happens that companies do things against their interest without knowing it as long as top line sales go up.

Companies give people license to do things in their own interest that are NOT in the companies interest all the time.

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

#67

Post by a5seo »

Sujan wrote: post #52
noonespecial wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 plac…

The user might have received the one pixel "trap" cookie, but the article says they were watching to see users who only visited 1 page, since "normal" users click around and look at a few pages. If you only get the hidden pixel once, that's a sign you aren't normal.

It will be interesting to see how this goes in court since you cannot prove that any given single user was NOT a "real" user. But on the whole, the traffic smells wrong.

I don't understand why eBay didn't just ban the users when they suspected foul play. Trying to prove this criminally beyond a reasonable doubt would have been hard.

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

#68

Post by Sujan »

unreal37 wrote: post #61
Sujan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5651510 - just doesn't work that way afaik.

I don't think this description is accurate. It makes no sense for an invisible iframe to display the entire ebay homepage to the user - people would notice 100's of server connections and an extra 1MB download for a page view. More likely they found the one Javascript file on ebay that creates the cookie, and ONLY loads that Javascript.

Well, I know that's how _lots_ of people did it in 2003/2004. The guys I hang out with (ahem...) were some of them. In the more shady parts of the internet it's actually still quite common today. Nobody notices anything.

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

#69

Post by DiabloD3 »

danielweber wrote: post #38
DiabloD3 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this entire story makes no sense. They just attacked their own affiliate base and tried to paint it as a good thing. Did these two people featured in the story do anything that was against US Federal law? Did they violate the eBay affiliates agreement (and that can't result in criminal charges anyhow)? I've read through all three pages of the story twice, and all I'm seeing is eBay wanted to have their cake and…

You pay me $100 for every 10 people I get to fill out a card with their mailing address asking for a catalogue from your company. I take 1000 of the cards and put random people's names and addresses on them and send them in, once a week every week. Fraud.

But thats not what the article claimed they did, and thats extremely hard to do with eBay's affiliate program.

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

#70

Post by Sujan »

kybernetyk wrote: post #62
Sujan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 plac…

You could trigger cookie setting with the img tag. http://affiliate-link-to-ebay.com&#62 ; would set the cookie on most browsers. I don't know if that works anymore because my "affiliate" time is well long over but I guess this loophole has been fixed long since. IIRC iframe was a little problematic with some websites as they had frame break out scripts [1] - so you had to be creative. The golden wild west times ...…

Ebay didn't use frame breakers, so much I know ;)
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