Originally Posted by AlienQ

Let me buy you drink.

Yeah exactly.
Its a full cloak that leaves detection upto the affiliate program itself of an abuser, leaving others out of the loop in reporting abuse.

Through forwarding a spammer encrypts his link code in the sent mail to a server that forwards the click to said program, then the program masks the af ID.

It gets more complicated to.
But it is an elaborate system built for this and this alone.