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jayeff · 11-09-2003, 01:25 AM

More cheating webmasters than cheating sponsors, certainly. Whose cheating involves the most money? Who knows...

But if a sponsor with $2M a month sales were creaming off say 10%, that's around $100K lost to their affiliates. It takes a lot of the $50 cheaters someone mentioned to beat that.

As long as most of the sponsors are private companies we won't know what they get up to or what they suffer. From experience in other industries I would guess that sponsors lose less through petty crooks than at the hands of people who cheat in a much more organised and harder to detect fashion: for example, hiding a 'reasonable' level of fraud among a high volume of legitimate transactions.

Blowing off a few small webmasters is like stores catching shoplifters: high profile, but not making much of a dent in the overall problem (which in their case is mainly caused by suppliers and staff). And since only a tiny minority are involved in theft or fraud on a serious scale, effective measures to catch them are often impractical and usually more costly than the losses they prevent.

11-09-2003, 01:25 AM
jayeff Confirmed User Join Date: May 2001 Posts: 2,944	More cheating webmasters than cheating sponsors, certainly. Whose cheating involves the most money? Who knows... But if a sponsor with $2M a month sales were creaming off say 10%, that's around $100K lost to their affiliates. It takes a lot of the $50 cheaters someone mentioned to beat that. As long as most of the sponsors are private companies we won't know what they get up to or what they suffer. From experience in other industries I would guess that sponsors lose less through petty crooks than at the hands of people who cheat in a much more organised and harder to detect fashion: for example, hiding a 'reasonable' level of fraud among a high volume of legitimate transactions. Blowing off a few small webmasters is like stores catching shoplifters: high profile, but not making much of a dent in the overall problem (which in their case is mainly caused by suppliers and staff). And since only a tiny minority are involved in theft or fraud on a serious scale, effective measures to catch them are often impractical and usually more costly than the losses they prevent.