Just got scammed by a tube site. Program owners read this!
 

Hi Everyone,

I thought I would share a little experience I just had with a Tube site. At least one tube site owner has reached a new low. Here's what happened:

A couple of days ago I was pouring over the numbers and I couldn't balance. Why were my regular sales high but my payouts to CCBill lower than they should be? I could not reconcile my net sales properly and my figures were off from 30 to 50%.

I had almost given up since I was so tired that day and was about to chalk it all up to fatigue, when I decided to check my affiliate reports. I noticed one affiliate in particular had sent a nice number of sales my way. I was happy to see it until I clicked the transaction link, and saw that one of these sales was an existing customer. "Damn!" I thought. "There goes an unnecessary commission payout, but oh well."

I then click another transaction number and saw that this too was also an existing customer. Then another, then another!! As it turns out, ALL of the transactions from this affiliate were existing customers.

How did this happen? These customers have been on our site for years now. Why was I suddenly paying commissions for their repeat business?

I decided to ask my customers, and they told me they were INVITED to this website. As it turns out, this tube site may also have been stealing our content by taking taking a girl into private chat, copying the video and adding it to his tube site. He was then contacting our customers via our forum and inviting them to his tube site to see the content. When our customers entered the tube site, the CCBill affiliate cookie was then deposited to that users browser. When they returned to our site and spent more money, the tube site owner received the credit and the commission.

And not just for 1 or 2 sales, but for as many as 91!

The Tube site is called FuzzTime dot com.
http://www.networksolutions.com/whoi...h/fuzztime.com

If you have an affiliate program, I urge you to pay very close attention to it. This kind of affiliate fraud is something that I never would have suspected would happen, but now that I think of it's such a simple scam any scumbag can do it.

Sorry to hear about it Mark, so very sad that there is a lot of affiliates scamming their customers now :(

got it, noted and a great big Thank You to you sir

Holy shit. Now THAT is a major issue! Good detective work, and thanks for the heads up. Sorry to hear about the grief.

This industry never ceases to amaze me.

They owned you.

Was he cookie stuffing them?

Its skywalk running the site...

adapt or die.

Good scam,,,what did you do about it?

Holy fuck, that is low.

Seems that way. :2 cents:

Something else to look for...

Fucking weasels,nothing surprises me the lengths people go to

read this

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/c..._spammers_and/

Sorry to hear

Wow really smart.

And the first you knew about this was from ccbill? Why do you not monitor your own forum? You could surely have nipped it in the bud.

You have your forum settings set so posters can comunicate with one another via private messages or by direct email?

That's pretty ingenious.

why can the cookie by overwritten in the first place ?
Since you're talking about affiliates, this means that an affiliate can steal another's sales.
Are you trying to pull a livejasmin on your affiliates ?

damn thats pretty messed up sorry to hear it

Dawm scammers are getting smarter

oh thanks for the warning, Mark.

bump for keeping eyes out

Odd,i though once you have customer commission from him cannot be transferred away.

Too bad for your loss! Thanks for the alarming everyone!

Its called cookie stuffing. You can find plenty of info about it in google or black hat forums

it doesn't surprise me. once you've got an illegal tube you're already a thief, criminal, whatever.

rather clever of the tube site.

to be honest if you run a form thais way, surly your open to this.

i mean your lucky he sent people back to you rather than to another pay site.

chances are he may now have there email contacts and will be pointing them to other sites.

why have a forum? it seems crazy to me.

Mark, that is a HUGE Hole left open on your end. Really nothing to do with tube sites. A cam site should never allow members to contact other members. The only place this should be able to happen is in chat, beyond that I would not allow any member to talk to other members. Your case is a good example why, but it could have been a lot worse. Instead of a tube site trying to cookie stuff your existing members so they could make the referral money it could have been another cam site offering $100 free credits if your members tried out their cam site instead. Then you would lose the member all together instead of over paying on the referral.

If you really really feel the need to let members contact each other ( I wouldn't) then you need to police the shit out of that and put safe guards in place. In chat it is a lot easier since you should be logging all convos and blocking certain words and red flagging others.

Members can easily be lured away with free content in this case, or free cam credits as explained in my example. Chat host on the other hand are a lot more skeptical and will usually ignore other cam sites trying to recuit them but I would still put safe guards in place for that as well.

I would shut that hole off right away.


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Thank you for sharing your experience!

I follow what you saying, but I think he meant that the customers were in house sales, and then the tube site (affiliate) set their cookie and instead of him making 100% on the sales he now had to pay them out an affiliate commission. Im guessing here, but was what I got from what he was saying.

If another affiliate was the original owner of that customer and then the tube site stole it, it would have no net loss to Mark, in that case he probably wouldn't have noticed it. I think he noticed this because he was watching all of his in house accounts get converted to affiliate accounts. Which if this is the case, it is nice of him to allow his affiliate to get credit for in house members. I wouldn't. If I owned the cam company and paid money for advertising and got customers I would treat that traffic like any other affiliate and they would own that customer.

Good point. That's something to look out for.

Cookie "stuffers"

I cant believe they can do that way and steal your pay traffic. And there is nobody to protect you from that.

Let me get this right:
If affiliate A makes a revshare sale, then affiliate B can get credit for rebills (which should be credited A) if he manage to stuff cookie on the customer????? Or is it only on internal new sales?

just internal sales

Ok, so it works like this:

Affiliate A sends a customer and get credited on signup (PPS I asume), the program gets the credit on rest of internal sales (like pay-per-view), but affiliate B (also A) can hijack existing customers and send them there again and get credited on new PPS?

The solution:
The internal communication should be monitored by software to flag such spam, and the customer system should "lock and assign" existing customers (their creditcard) until they cancel membership. Otherwise it's flawed and attract scammers.
Exposing scammers is one thing, but they should also look into their own system.

read this mark, this is him

Did you trash his account?