Originally Posted by dcortez

The email addresses in question here are the ones affiliates give their sponsors when they sign up for an affiliate program.

Enough affiliates (myself included) are convinced that the spam we are getting is the result of our affiliate info (ie. the email address) being 'let go' in some manner to the spammers by someone who manages that info (sponsor? processor handling affiliate program? employees/agents stealing the sponsor/processor databases? hackers stealing the sponsor/processor databases).

The first time this happened (over a year go), the email addresses I was using could have been potentially guessed, but in order to tighten up and track the offenders, I have been using very unique email addresses mapped 1:1 for each sponsor - and these unique addresses are showing up as the recipients for the spam we are getting.

These addresses were leaked somehow and I think we need to reconcile where these leaks are considering the implications.

If a sponsor or processor was hacked, they should let us know so we at least have the option to change our passwords/email addresses, etc.

From the flood of spam we have been getting for the past couple days it's not just one or two isolated sponsors - it's a bunch of them, but I do believe they may have a common processor, which begs the obvious questions.

I'd be willing to accept a sponsor/processor dropping the ball security-wise and owning up to it - security is a tough challenge in this biz.

I will not be as accepting of sponsors and/or processor who are leaking our data intentionally for whatever reason.