Fraud-My Favorite thing to Kill-
Well this is my first post besides my HI I am here post.
I must say that one of my favorite things to do is to find fraud.
As the Affiliate Manager for the goZing Network, we used to have over 80 different programs and the majority were not our own.
Back then the fraud process was not as much of a concern as it is today. We made revenues so fraud unless it was obvious was something the Advertiser needed to focus on more than we did. Don't get me wrong, we still looked for fraud from the start and booted people out. But now we only use our Network for our own offers. As the Advertiser, we care more about fraud than we ever did in the past as it is our top priority.
We use DirectTrack for our own program. Their are many great tools built into that system for fraud managment. It shows us duplicate applications based on Address, Name or IP within our own applications. You can setup warnings to indicate the application is coming from a certain country. We require that all applications fill out a W8/W( at the time of applying which is a new feature I have added. If you want to stop fraud, ask someone in China to fill out a W8 tax form when they apply.
Now my favorite tools to do are to use the WHOIS as well as Alexa to look up the sites. Alexa is helpful if the Whois is blocked as it often will tell you details about the sites rankings, who is linking to the site and sometimes it has the data when WHOIS does not.
Look at all websites very carefully as well. I can give you examples, but there are many chineese affiliates that take real sites, register other sites and change the name slightly. These hijacked sites are hard to detect because the WHOIS matches and the sites look great with good content. A good way to tell is ALEXA and the site rankings their. If it looks like a good site and it has a Copyright date over a few year, and Alexa has NO Ranking for, beware!
Well I could go on and on.
But the number one fraud prevention tool is the most simple and basic tool. Pick up the phone and call the affiliate or send an email to the address on the site if it does not match the one one the application.
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