jayeff

I agree with a lot of what you have written in your past couple of posts, but unless - which is entirely possible - I have missed something very basic, the damage has already been done before the sponsor ever sees the traffic.

A visitor clicks on one of your links and at that point he is hi-jacked whether to your sponsor (carrying someone else's referrer code) or to another sponsor entirely. So even if an honest sponsor had the means to identify this type of traffic, he could not return it or credit it to its rightful owner. He simply won't have the necessary information.

Sponsors can and should do more to minimize the incentive to steal from their legitimate affiliates, but it isn't helpful to ask them for things which are technically impossible