Very disturbing message from a ccbill program on potential cheating
 

A paysite I promote informally told me

IMO CCBill is not honest. How do I know this? I signed up as my own affiliate and put the code on my home page. Sales went up.

What????
Not quite sure what he means. Following my own link to his site it looks like I still get credit for my sales since I show up as hidden referal.

Its disturbing that the guy would do something like this. Its disturbing that he would flat out tell me. Its disturbing if this would actually be as simple like this...

Any information or thoughts on this?

nothing amazes me anymore

talking to pat right now to see what the situation is

Seems strange, why would they help affiliate vs owners?

I hope this gets sorted out for you. That's rough.

strange thing happenes

Note :
I feel if somebody would be doing this, this person would be in the wrong.
The person would be abusing ccbill. Fault would not be with CCbill
Also the owner of the paysite has been instable in the past and has made recless claims before.
I am just copying his words here but I would not likely put any money on his claims

If you put your affiliate ID into a page, the sales on that affiliate ID will go up.

With CCbill, the Webmaster can put anything they want in the tour. CCBill tracking doesn't care what the tour passes in, they track you when the link is clicked and when you return to the join page.

I don't quite understand this.

so you start a thread titled "Very disturbing message from a ccbill program on potential cheating" and in the next breath say you got this information from an unstable source and you would not put any weight into what he was saying

then what is the point of this thread?

This thread is weird.

Maybe the program owner is just "giving you a line" to explain why his site is not converting
for you.

To weigh the value cause it is disturbing.
If would be disturbing if it was true and it would be disturbing if it was not true.

Hope you see that?

No I did not talk about conversions.
He was moving away to another program and told me the reason.

Thank you.

:2 cents:

If you put an affiliate id into anything with traffic, it will start to get sales, I was being a smart ass.

The 2nd paragraph is like nats. The linking code, the second it gets clicked, it tracks everything even before the tour is loaded, sets the cookie, and redirects the surfer. Once the surfer reaches the join page, between cookie/ip tracking-matching and the session, the surfer is re-tracked.

As long as the site owner doesn't resend the visitor through a linking code, your ID will never be reset with the backend system. The hard-coded tour is just for looks, it does get used as a backup if the backend system can't track the visitor.

In this guys case, he is screwing Webmasters out of returns. Which is prob why he sees more sales. But it isn't some major jump. But less Webmaster sales means less traffic from your Webmasters. So he is just screwing himself in the long run.

Really screwing the Webmaster would be like many affiliate programs that reset the linking code on the Warning Pages. Once the linking code is reset, the backend system forgets about the previous referrer.

Sounds like an idiot screwing webmasters out of their sales, no?

name the program, the guy should be outed

I agree but Corvette is investigating everything now. I will wait for the outcome before I drop names.

can you avoid the cookies being reset by sending traffic to the join page? .. or have they figured a way to screw us there as well?

what a dumb thread - you post it not even knowing what the fuck the idiot who told you this is doing - 'put the code on my home page. Sales went up.' and YOU didn't ask him what the fuck that meant?

so you come to GFY not knowing anything really but make a thread title that suggests CCBILL is cheating or it's easy for programs to use CCBILL to cheat affiliates.

Its only a dumb thread to the dumb people.
Insee people here who see exactly what I mean.
Thanks.

what the 300 people who viewed this thread so far thought is that you are a moron

It makes perfect sense what he say, it's an option for all tracking systems and not just ccbill.
It is easy to detect for the webmasters that check the sites, what the program owners really do is signing up to their own program and create a traffic leak going to their own affiliate id somewhere on the site, any system that does cookie / session overwrite will change the affiliate id.
Obviously you can easily detect this by looking at what affiliate codes is passed on by surfing through the sites they promote :2 cents:

Try to read the posts by TheDoc and Due.
If you dont get it after that quit the biz mkay?

you get some nonsense from somebody unreliable over icq and start a thread about a ccbill program cheating

most affiliate systems, nats, mpa3, etc all use the last clicked method of tracking, where anyone can hide an affiliate link on a tour or join page to steal traffic, nothing new.

You could have checked this out yourself and if it was true, called out the program. but you post this nonsense where your not even sure what it means or if the guy is telling the truth

thats why your an moron, you post some dribble about a program and not name them

Ok since you dont get it I will try to help you a bit.
It was not on icq and about some ccbill program.
It was a message on a board by the owner of that ccbill program.

Yes most affiliate systems can do this. Whats your point? Mine is that it is disturbing. Even though it might now be new.


Tell me how I can check this myself? Sales went up he says...past tense.
Checking it my own code shows up as hidden referer so I must assume he is not doing it at this moment or his attempt failed...
Clicks are at the same level but clicks get counted at an earlier stage. I can not get back in time and see what he did.

Its disturbing cause this means I might have to check all ccbill sites I deal with (and of other programs) manually and regularly now.

With naming them I am waiting for the results of the ccbill investigation. Only they will be able to see for sure what happened.

I am not saying ccbill is a fraud. I am saying that this kind of fraud seems to be disturbingly easy.

well if the point of this thread is that sometimes affiliates can get cheated, then i dont understand is why you are saying this is a ccbill problem, rather than a nats/mpa3/industry problem, because they all have the same vulnerability.

and rather than bitch about not being able to go back in the past to see what happened, which id be surprised if ccbill could do anyway, how are you going to prevent it from happening again? you cant

if affiliate software use the first cookie/click method, then how can you even verify your not getting shaved at all? so its not perfect, but its the best solution available and thats why everyone uses it.

please educate me because i obviously dont "get it"

CCbill should be able to see a new affialiate for this affiliate program with a sharp increase in sales for this site.
Since they are also able to track urls they should be able to see where the traffic from this person is coming from. If the traffic for this affiliate is coming from homepage,tour, joinpage that would make it clear.

Is your real question why dont you approach ccbill first before you post it on the board? Ask me so...

sure, ccbill spends all that time doing that work and they see some history of hits from the join page going to an affiliate with the same info as the account owner.

i guess thats enough evidence to turn their account and affiliate program off and destroy their business. their paying customer, youve seen this happen before.

get a clue

anyway, im not going to argue anymore(unless you say something i really have to respond to), i just think this is a silly thread with you trying to stir up shit thats not there.

I hope you are wrong but you actually made sense with this post.