jreg81

So we had this guy sign-up as an affiliate about 60 days ago. Starts sending a bunch of sales right away, very steadily, like several every day.

I was curious about it so I kept looking at the referring URLs (we use NATS 4.1), as I randomly do with affiliate sales anyway, and noticing that all his sales came from the same, solitary blog post on a bunch of differently domained sensualwriter blogs. He only had one single photo of one of our models, and just 2 or 3 written (poorly, at that) sentences.

So I was thinking, maybe this guy just has a ton of traffic from good trades and keywords or whatever.

Sales keep rolling in from him, but I remain curious.

So now, about 60 days later....the CHARGEBACKS are rolling in. In fact, he's now at about a 9% chargeback rate for the number of sales he's sent, and I'm sure it will increase in the coming weeks.

So I think it's safe for me to assume he's banging cards? Or is it? 9% seems pretty high from one affiliate. Our overall CB ratio is only like 1% normally. Is there any way this guy could be anything other than a thief/scammer/cheat?

I've already suspended his account and emailed him about it. No reply as of yet. It's only been a day or so.

Funny, he had just messaged us a few days ago asking when we do our payouts.

I wonder how some of you other program owners out there handle this type of thing. We had a bad problem before with Filipino "chat traffic" people. Nothing but chargebacks. Banned them all. Never again.

I take the time to browse over our sales each day, looking for patterns which might indicate suspicious transactions (i.e. - females names for the credit card), and when I do see ones that look fraudulent, I go right to the biller and refund them.

I also look very closely at each and every chargeback, especially ones from an affiliate sale. If it's a trusted, long-time affiliate, no problem, it happens. Friendly fraud is almost impossible to stop really (guy joins site, enjoys it, then lies to his bank saying he didn't make the purchase and does a CB). If it's a newer affiliate I don't know, I scrutinize it closer.

Also relevant to the discussion is we are now in the midst of trying to set-up our own merchant account to end up with more of our money---instead of those high %'s that go to our 3rd party billers. But with that, comes the added worry of dealing with things like I've described above even more. Which having your own merchant account makes a bit more stressful as you need to keep your CB ration % under a certain level or risk losing the account completely (we'll still keep our 3rd party billers in our cascade of course).

So I'm just curious to hear the thoughts and experiences from some of the other program owners out there on some of this....

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