Affiliate marketing on the Internet continues to rapidly gain
global popularity across the general public. This is also why many scammers and
criminal syndicates are now exploiting this system for their fraud online
activities. This system is where a business or a solo marketer signs up as an
affiliate of a product manufacturer, a service provider or an ecommerce store,
which are known in this arrangement as merchants. When an affiliate
successfully refers a customer to the merchant's sales page through a unique
affiliate link, the affiliate is awarded with commissions whenever the customer
does a mutually agreed action, such as purchasing the product, signing up to a
mailing list, filling out a form and so on.
Most merchants agree to pay affiliates the commissions they
earned following a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly schedule. Some offer instant
commission payouts to lure more users into signing up as their affiliates.
Payout commissions go up to as high as 90% of the total product or service
cost, which is done to entice more businesses, content publishers, online
traffic generators and solo marketers to sign up. A lot of scammers and
criminal syndicates recognize these payment schedules and high payout
commissions as an opportunity for them to earn huge amounts of money by committing affiliate fraud online.
How Do Scammers Commit Affiliate Fraud Online?
Most scammers and criminal syndicates sign up as affiliates
of an ecommerce merchant for the opportunity to run stolen credit cards through
their online payment processing platforms and checkout systems. Some of them
use hacked bank accounts to commit affiliate fraud online. They use these
compromised financial accounts to purchase the merchant's products and services
using their affiliate links.
They earn commissions from those transactions. They usually
manage to collect their commission payouts a few weeks before legitimate card
holders and bank account owners notice the illegitimate transactions and
unauthorized payments in their monthly statements.
This is why many scammers and criminal groups sign up as
affiliates of merchants with quick payout schedules. They also prefer ecommerce
stores and online establishments with very minimal user identity verification
requirements for their new affiliates. The more ecommerce businesses they
target for their affiliate fraud online tactics, the better chances they get to
get away with their scams and steal more money from the legitimate owners of
the credit cards and bank accounts that they use.
If you're an ecommerce merchant with an affiliate program,
then you should consider hiring a third party user identity verification
service provider to avoid affiliate fraud online. You can integrate their
manual processes for confirming the identities of users who want to sign up as
your affiliates into your sign-up systems. They can also help you authenticate
any transactions that are done by your direct customers and affiliate referrals
in your ecommerce stores. This can significantly reduce if not entirely
eliminate affiliate fraud online from your ecommerce establishment. You might
want to sign up at BigScammers.Com to learn about the other ways that a lot of
fraudsters and criminal syndicates are currently using to commit similar scams
against ecommerce businesses today.
