Walrus, with all respect that comes with this sort of discussion, you have to remember tha tthere is one and only one motivating factor at work here:
Money.
The stock exchanges recently shut down 35 stocks that were targets or perhaps even profiting from pump and dump spam mails:
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/news/arc...310/104269.htm
(yes, btw, I find it really funny that the best place to find an AP wire story was the China post, but that would be for another thread).
Programs have to start being more selective about where they accept traffic from, and they have to put as much effort into checking out affiliates as they put into putting beer in their hands. The average program could really be improved by adding 1 or 2 people on staff to check accounts on a regular (ie daily) basis, reviewing thousands of refering pages and checking to see where stuff comes from.
In my surfing tonight, I also found another great scam: A PPC search engine that is accepting CJ traffic, filtered through a single page that looks like a TGP by itself. People are likely paying pretty big money for clicks, and the reality is that they are paying for shit traffic. Yet none of these programs would pay me 10 cents a click for click thru traffic. It doesn't make sense.
Scams like the codecs are stealing money from honest affiliates, and too often the programs are tolerant because the profit from it. They don't realize that the joins would come anyway.