Fraud Alert - Affiliate Network Accounts for Sale

[Linda Buquet]

I frequent a lot of affiliate forums and have seen a growing number of people trying to buy and sell affiliate network accounts recently. I even get PMs, mainly over at DigitalPoint, from people trying to buy network accounts. You know if they have to buy accounts they are up to no good and are probably fraudsters. And you know if people are selling accounts there's a pretty good market for them.

The guys at the MediaTrust blog posted about this problem yesterday and have been seeing lots of buy and sell affiliate accounts action on Twitter. Here's their post about it.

Fraud Alert - Accounts for Sale

"So why should you care about this? Well, first off, if you’re a publisher, this is exactly the type of thing that gives our industry a bad name. It will cause networks to clamp down even tighter on who they accept – possibly excluding great potential affiliates in the process. If you’re a network, you should care because your credibility, and bottom line is at stake with your advertisers. Fraud is hard enough to police – now we have to worry about the buying and selling of affiliate accounts for the sole purpose of defrauding the networks and their advertisers?"

[RCPAThunder]

I couldn't agree more. Even though I have a list of procedures that need to go through before accepting any publishers application, yet, there was/is still some problems with fraudulent. I realized that, for some publishers, I am able to contact them by phone when they first sign up, however, after a week or a month later when I want to check up on them, the phone number is no longer in service; and it's hard to contact them afterward as well. Therefore, it is necessary that any Network should enforce the rules and expectation when accepting any applications.