Attention: Program owners. Do you give a shit how you get your affiliate sales?

Will, my point on educating them is so these surfers know that whatever tactics being used is not the standard practices of this industry. Having them clean up their systems can only benefit all of us. Help them clean their computers so they can get back to surfing and spending money. If they infected myspace users computers, do you realize how many people are infected?

Class action lawsuits would also work if you can all install this crap on your computers and literally film the hijack (SnagIt has a video capture option). Find the lawyers to take it on.

All I know is that bastard program was on my husband's computer last week and I wasted 2-3 hours trying to remove it & still the thing would come back after a reboot. Cleaned out the registries and all and it was still coming back. I'm pretty good at keeping my computers clean and cleaning them up - do you think normal surfers are successful at doing this? I finally gave up and told hubby to use the laptop for now until I can get to it again with that link I posted earlier.

They don't care at all...

I think it NEVER hurts to let people know on your busy site that if they see a popup, that they are infected etc etc etc. with links to removal tools where applicable. Some large traffic sites do this and it certainly doesnt hurt at all.

I have only encountered this problem using cookies but the more I read up on this it looks like they can do anything they want once they have their shit on your computer. Don't think it matters if it is sessions or cookies, it looks like they can hijack the affiliate sale anyway it happens...

You just made a statement " help them clean their pcs" then followed upo with " how in the hell will normal surfers be able to do this?". You explained just explained why educating the surfer is not an realistic option. If it took you and your husband hours to get the shit uninstalled and even then it kept coming back how do you expect new online users to get this fixed ?

I understand it is good PR for them to know it is not us doing it, but really that doesn't matter too much one way or the other if they can't get the crap off of their PC it is still costing me sales.


I will be seriously looking into the class action lawsuit today. Curious to see what an attorney would say about this, case or no case? You never know with those guys.

if they promote Zango, they should be shot.

if they promote Zango, and they advertise other sites as an affiliate they should shoot themselves.

Spyware thread gets me to register at GFY!

This sucks, I can't post helpful URL's yet! Let's try something else...

I've been lurking around here for some time but never registered. But this thread got my full attention. I've been fighting spyware online for about 5 years now. It rips me off every day both in the mainstream and adult industries.

Ben from MoreNiche posted some good info. WTG Ben!

There are people out there who can test your programs (sponsors) or sites (affiliates) for a fee. You can visit affiliatefairplay dot com for more info. The owner of that site has been testing spyware for merchants and large networks (CJ, BF, LS and others) for years to help them catch rule breakers and cheaters.

She just started offering a service to the adult industry (and mainstream) to provide information on who/what is cheating your program or popping up on your site(s). You can also contract her to monitor your site for spyware activities. She's quite affordable. The service is available to affiliates, sponsors and networks.

And then there's Ben Edelman who is quite an expert in this field too but a lot more expensive. Ben has served as an expert witness in court in cases against spyware. Not sure who posted his URL, but I'll post it again benedelman dot org

There are MORE than 400 spyware programs in existence today. It's impossible to keep track of them all on your own.

I believe in exposing the scum affiliates AND scum sponsors publicly who allow this in their program to rip us off. When I find a program that doesn't do anything about it, ignores my emails on the subject, or replies that they don't care, I delete them from my sites.

Just a few days ago, I was clicking on Total Access Porn from Dollar Machine. I immediately got an enormous amount of popups, one of them for zangocash. My firewall blocked access to the site and didn't allow the popup to be displayed. I sent them an email about this to which I still need to receive a reply. I give them until the end of the week to answer and then all their links will be deleted from my site and I will tell my visitors WHY.

What they don't get is that spyware rips THEM off too because it's the URL that triggers the popup, not the affiliate site.

For example: the targeted URL via zango is couplesseduceteens.com (just an example because I read here that TB doesn't allow spyware).

So if a visitor remembers the URL and returns to the site on his own and types it in directly, even after clearing cookies, zango WILL pop up again and the sponsor now has to pay a commission to a direct sale that should have been NON commissionable. So sponsors get ripped off as much as we do, especially if they have URL's easy to remember for surfers. They just don't have a clue.

Another program, siteadvisor dot com - now owned by McAfee, is a good one to have and it's free. Altough I don't find it 100% accurate and their spamming comments are way off board at times, it sure gives you a good idea of which sites are clean and which ones are not. It saved me a few times!

We all need to educate sponsors we work with on this issue. Many programs don't shave, you're just being ripped off by spyware.

I offer several options on all my sites for spyware blockers and spyware removal tools.

Missie

A small sampling
Zango pushers
other Zango pushers

About 5 minutes ahead of you , i started looking back myself.

So the question is, are these people fucking stupid or clueless or both. Here is the first i found.

DaddyHalBucks
http://www.gfy.com/showpost.php?p=10796608&postcount=65

Thank you for posting and providing good info, and for joining GFY. We need more posters like you.

I found the Ben Edelman site, he explains it very well.

You are right it does hurt sponsors directly (from their own sales). And also as I have pointed out, indirectly because if affiliates lose more and more sales from that program (because of the spybot) then they will stop promoting them and switch to somethign else. When they switch to something else the affiliate company stops making those sales, via the spy bot company because that person is not prompting that URL to come up on the infected surfers computer.

Funny how more and more people are saying AFF / Cams are not doing good anymore. I have seen them pushed the most on these spy bots. I didn't want to name names yet until I can contact these companies or have them post here but that is one example how affiliates losing sales hurts the affiliate company in an indirect way. Having a bunch of people pissed off here saying their signups have tanked over time, conversions are shit, sure doesn't help to get new webmasters to signup to that program.

Look at this moron.

http://www.gfy.com/showpost.php?p=10641323&postcount=3

You talk about balls. Come on here and try to promote your program to the people you are ripping off.

These fuckers need to go down.

He has only posted twice, but I wonder if GFY will ban this user and "xxxx" out that url ?

Good info, Missie, welcome.

Yeah siteadvisor gives a warning or yellow alert or whatever it is exactly for PimpRoll because we have a signup box for our affiliate newsletter on the main page. Kind of a lame "warning", but easily recognizable as benign, so no complaints.

Another either clueless or fucking stupid.

Manowar
http://www.gfy.com/showpost.php?p=9585269&postcount=5


how many of you people here are promoting this shit? Are you insaine ?!#!#!!#

There was one 'major' player here that was pushing it, and seemed genuinely surprised they were up to no good when he was told about their shitware. Whether or not he is still pushing them I have no idea. But in general I would have to say most just haven't done their homework, and the others just don't give a shit because they love the quick buck.

Costa Rico Bash.... nice to see zango on the list of sponsors.

http://www.gfy.com/showpost.php?p=9170142&postcount=5

what is wrong with you people ?

As far as AFF is concerned. They say they don't allow a lot of this stuff, but their track history seems to prove otherwise. They are all over Edelmans site, the se's for their name and spyware, and have a nice permanent location in the FTC archives as big financial contributors to shitware that ended in a judgement against the maker.
Seems they could be more on top of it, and they say they are, but..

I assumed most would fall into the " Clueless" category. Hopefully this wakes them all up, affiliates and sponsors.

Daddyhalbucks seems to be pushing the hell out of this. http://www.gfy.com/showpost.php?p=9613911&postcount=23


here is another:
kernelpanic
http://www.gfy.com/showpost.php?p=9176529&postcount=1

This affects everyone of us here and just a handfull of people have commented on it. Unbelievable.

So to everyone else, what are you doing about this? nothing? just keep letting them steal your signups?

bump.....

Figures DaddyHalbucks pushes them. He has no interest in this industry anyhow.

I would do ANYTHING I could to prevent that! Webmasters would stop sending traffic to my sites, if they didnt convert! 0:100000 makes you drop a program! Thats not gonna happend

exactly, but it doesn't happen over night, it is a slow progession, you will see your conversion ratio get worse and worse as more and more people get infected. Some people might blame it on slow downs, gas prices, other shit. Some people are not even aware these spybots are doing this. Look what zango just did on myspace. Myspace is sueing them because they were installing zango onto people's computers when they were playing videos on myspace. Now we are unable to make money off of all of those people.

I will stop bumping this thread when everyone on GFY knows about this and I am going to post similar information on as many webmaster boards as I can. Hopefully we can at lease educate the affiliates who are pushing their zangocash crap. If you push anything else other then zango cash then you are shooting yourself in the foot. They are overwriting a lot of affiliate accounts for several affiliate companies. SO you make .40 or whatever a download, now you (or any one else) can not make a penny off of that person. Everything they sign up to after zango is installed, zango will get credit for the sale. All so you can make your .40 per download. Real smart.

DaddyHalBucks is just a referral whore.. he may not have even known about it. He just spams his referral links in every thread.

About the Zango affiliate ripoffs though, this should affect sponsors too. Most of them pop enter and/or exit consoles for other sponsors. So, Zango is probably decreasing THEIR extra sales too.

Camazon cash definitely supports/facilitates spam. I've lodged complaints and not even a reply. I posted about it here -


http://www.gofuckyourself.com/showthread.php?t=656889

no reply, the affiliate code right in there. If they keep it up, the complaints will be directed to those they won't be able to ignore.

Sorry to divert from the topic Will.

exactly, that and think of all of the type-in signups that they should be making 100% on, where now they are having to pay zango because it is showing that Zango sent in the referral lol when in reality the surfer typed in the url.

So why do affiliate companies (minus the handfull that posted here) remain quiet on this issue ?

Will76 I'm glad to see someone with your attitude in this industry. I have been sooooo involved in this fight in the last few years! I repeat myself until I'm blue in the face but I don't care because if only one sponsor/mainstream merchant goes clean again or understands spyware enough to recognize it and get rid of it, it's well worth my time.

Most sponsors I've contacted in the past have told me that they do not allow spyware advertising of their programs yet ALL of them were targeted. Unfortunately, only a handful have something in their TOS to this effect.

Some have taken quick action, others have ignored the problem. For many, it's because they just don't understand what it does and how it works. Others just don't give a shit where the sales come from and won't do a thing about it.

It is up to us to educate them on the problem. Many large companies in mainstream are slowly leaving the adware world to come clean. Who wants their brand associated with computer problems??

But in porn or adult in general, it's a different story. I have never seen so many affiliate managers who just didn't know about this or understand the magnitude of this problem. They won't learn this on their own if they're never told there is a problem with their program.

And doing test sales on a CLEAN computer and saying it tracked and everything is fine is useless! All it proves is that tracking works, that's all. Sponsors that come up with this reasoning make me bang my head against the wall.

Those who promote pay-per-install programs like zangocash need to have their heads examined. Because that 40 cents is all they're ever going to see from that visitor. If you get 30K per day and you infect every one of them, NO ONE will make money with them in the future, including YOU.

CoolWebSearch is another huge one in porn. Just do a quick search on that one and see what it does to a computer...

Do you do banking online? Do you ever use a credit card online?

Most people are just plain ignorant about this stuff. Once they realize that they're also shooting themselves in the foot, the light comes on.

Don't forget that many sponsors/mainstream merchants advertise via spyware as well. Maybe they just think that by stealing affiliate sales it makes the payouts less painful when they do have to pay them.

Missie

Will it show zango as the referrer??

I honestly have no idea what we have in place to detect this but I'm going to send this thread to the office and find out exactly what measures they take. I'm sure they've run into this before because they watch their numbers very very closely.

If this is happening and for some reason no one was aware, they will be aware now and I promise you we will do everything in our power to find out and any affiliate caught doing this will be shit canned IMMEDIATELY. That is a promise.

Any complaint of this nature will be taken very seriously. In fact, whoever has this installed... can you type in our sites please? I'd be happy to axe some accounts today.

WTG RRRED!!!! Your attitude will probably make me sign up with your program now. We need more sponsors like you! Looks like I will be deleting Dollar Machine links in the next few days *sigh*.

Please visit affiliatefairplay dot com (I can't post real links yet) for more info. She is great! I just sent her the link to this thread. The price she charges for her service is peanuts compared to what we all lose to these scums every day. And you'll learn plenty! And that goes for any sponsor who wants to know more about spyware.

Missie

ps: I forgot to answer your question about zango. No it won't show zango as the referrer. It will show the affiliate link or ID of the affiliate using zango to advertise. Zango themselves used to (maybe still do) infiltrate affiliate program with various affiliate names. At some point they had over 170 different affiliate names, so you can't keep track of them all on your own. MetricsDirect is one for sure (you can read about that on Ben's site at benedelman dot org.

Thank you for posting too.

I had no idea this was happening, to this degree until it stared me in the face on my own computer. I had seen spyware in the past pop up random pages some of which were to sponsors i used but never anything as blatant as this.

I know this is affecting my income, if they are stealing even 10% of my income that is 6 figures from me alone they are stealing. I will do everything in my power to protect my income and I am anxiously waiting to hear back from my inhouse council who is investigating this matter from a class action lawsuit standpoint. I would love to make this company pay.

If anyone here reads this and you do nothing you are a fool an obviously you don't care about your income. This is no different then someone walking into your house each day and taking money out of you wallet.

Put pressure on sponsors! report affiliate accounts that they are using.Find people pushing zangocash and knock some sense into them, nothing else bumpthis thread so everyone can educate themselves on this.

I thought this was going to be a discussion about chat spam or something.

spyware and adware, yup that stuff is pretty fished up :/

fished up? what do you mean ?

Will,

Contact affiliatefairplay dot com and ask her to document your sites with videos and all the proof you'll need. She's a great asset to have on your side. You won't believe your eyes. That's what she does for a living. I would post others for whom I KNOW that she has done that but I don't want to step on any toes. If they want to come out and say it, they will.

If zango targets you, the odds are that there are many other spyware programs that target you as well, you just don't know it. Some like CoolWebSearch specialize in porn although they'll target anything and everything!

Missie

Sponsors should be killing these accounts if they get complaints... There is no excuse for them to allow scammers to steal sales from their true affiliates.

I'm sure most sponsors would have no problem killing the account if you could prove that they're hijacking links, as someone mentioned above... The sale will still go through, but the scammer won't be getting paid for it.

This thread should convince them to stop... those running Zangocash should go to prison for this, they're petty theives.

That's all well and good but just killing the accounts isn't going to stop them for 1 second. Was stated above they have at least 170 account names and can create new ones on the fly. Needs to get a bit deeper than just killing accounts obviously.

Missie, here's a link for you
http://www.affiliatefairplay.com/

Any respectable program would care, it would make true affiliates ratios look like shit and they would loose alot of traffic.


Ps. Do you promote Zango? you were looking into it a while back
http://www.gfy.com/showthread.php?t=592264

Missie - the example you gave - is this something you are seeing with our sites or is it just an example? Lord knows I'd love to have the nuts of whomever is stealing from my affiliates, the company I work for and ultimately my kids

My contact info is below - if ever anyone of you see anything funky going on with our sites - please do contact me and pronto. I'm always around or not very faraway.

Thanks

HAHAHA Thanks Brujah!

Actually she just told me that she's been here to read this thread already. She also said that she was going to check a few links she found here. If she finds anything on those links, I'm sure you'll be contacted. And then she might even register and post to help clear up a lot of misunderstandings about spyware. If she does, she's definitely the one to go to for all sponsors who want to know more about this, as well as affiliates.

What a lot of people don't understand is that these spyware applications rarely come on their own. They are often bundled with other spyware programs. So you get one but in reality you get a dozen of them because they all piggyback on each other.

If you don't have a good spyware blocker and a good firewall, what the hell are you doing online every day? That's pretty much what I tell my visitors. So they delete their cookies every day or every week. Oh well. I never counted on cookie sales since I started affiliate marketing in 1999. I'd rather lose a sale to the sponsor or merchant than to some scum affiliate who just steals from me.

Without affiliates to steal from, spyware would go nowhere. Hell, they probably wouldn't even exist. They don't have sites of their own, so the only thing they can do is steal from others or allow other affiliates to do it. Who in their right mind installs those things on purpose???

If sponsors advertise via ppc, you lose a ton of those sales to spyware if you allow it or don't know about it. If you rank well on SERPS, same thing. Spyware doesn't care how they end up on your site, it's your URL that is the target, not the affiliate site (although this happens too).

If an affiliate suddenly starts making a ton of sales out of nowhere, investigate.

If an affiliate is getting few hits but very high conversions, investigate.

If an affiliate is getting thousands of hits with no sales, investigate.

If many of your affiliates are telling you and complaining of their lack of sales or sudden drop in conversions, investigate.

I would much rather be contacted by a sponsor to ask me about my traffic and what I do to get such high conversions or such high amounts of traffic (without asking for all the details, of course) than the sponsor saying "good job Missie, WTG Missie, well done Missie" and doing nothing about it. That would tell me that the sponsor is on the ball and researching where the sales are coming from. It would give me much more confidence in that sponsor, because I KNOW that they're doing something.

No one is going to learn about spyware in one day or from one thread. But it's a good start. We have to keep this in the face of sponsors, make it known to the industry, and ASK that something be done about it.

I drop all sponsors that do nothing when told about a spyware problem.

What do you do?

Missie

It was just an example, because I saw in a post that you don't allow it in your program. I have no spyware on my computer and I don't test for it, so I really wouldn't know who is targeted. That's why affiliatefairplay dot com exists, for people like us. If she tests some of your links and she finds something, you can be assured that she will contact you about it.

Missie

Sorry man, translation = fucked up, flipped up, etc ;)

But yeh, stealing signups via the methods you brought up are wicked shady.

Not shocked that it's still going on though.

zango is a stand-up company:

http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/2959

quote: "Software downloaded from 180Solutions servers is promoting child porn."

Great thread, thanks for bringing this to my attention. And bump.

Unfortunetly I agree.. Money clouds the mind then greed takes over

Yes I care and if I find an affiliate doing this I will ban them. Affiliates who send the best traffic monitor their traffic/sign ups. People using this bot could be losing me sales in the long run.

A class action would be a good move, it seems illegal even a criminal matter.

Oh man, I tried to quote the post below but it wouldn't take it because of the URL. Have I posted 30 posts yet???

Actually it wasn't 180Solutions that popped the child porn, it was the Yap browser. I guess this was a case of "guilty by association". 180Solutions is notorious for saying "we didn't know, we are the victims here". It's like... we know what you're up to, we know what you do, and we don't care, but if you get caught you're on your own and we'll deny everything.

If you read Wayne Porter's ramblings on revenews dot com you'll learn some more about spyware and what's going on in the spyware world. He's got some good stuff on 180Solutions.

Missie

zango, not to be confused with http://www.zombo.com/ where you can do anything.



BUMP: For a serious topic that needs to get worked out one of these years.

I don't think they actually replace cookies since they got in trouble for that a while back. I think the problem is the affiliate programs with weak/short lived cookies. Don't rip the affiliates off with BS cookies (how about 365 days?) and the problem should be solved.

Thanks for the advice, I think ours are 120 days might them up even further.

But does that hurt the second affiliate sending the join?