with such a comment someone can come to the only logical conclusion that your sig is about yourself!

this are some really decent numbers.

Excellent answer, and I will be hitting you up on Monday to discuss a few things if that is ok with you (business wise).

For the nosey people (LOL) you seem to have a good business accumen, which unfortunately in this day in age is far & few between and very rare (let alone in this industry).

However you wrote, and I quote:
Who is to say that isn't a PPC campaign set to run only during certain time frames because statistically those are the best join times for Brand X's niche from my many years of tinkering?

Many spyware joins are legitimate class "A" customers with valid credit cards and lube in hand. Carded joins will always get nabbed (most of the time, if you are on your toes) but this spyware shit has just generated an easy stream of traffic for those that are shady enough to install it, and/or pay for it's advertising programs.

The day an age of Ivan Kutch-a-kokoff writing his own trojan, popping up a series of FPAs or galleries from his $19.95 cellar dwelling, hogh school kid maintained server, in order to grab our sales are gone. These guys are smart mother fuckers, and now it has become popup, PPC, pay per pop big business. Like I said (not sure if it was in this thread or another along the same lines), but these ass munch's are fucking genious and anyone here that say otherwise is only lying to themselves.

There is a reason that Ferrari driving fellas such as Lars, Sagi and the lot of them used them. It may have been a bad PR move because they were caught and I honestly do not think that they understood completely the ramifications of their actions (may that have understoood the technique of trafic generation from Zango or not), but this shit is large. When I say large, I mean HUGE!

I happen to own a small chain of PC repair shops here in the tri-county area, and I deal with this every fucking day. Granted I have become a Zango expert, but between Zango and the supposed Spyware scanners (Spy Sheriff, etc) that auto install and tell you that you MUST buy their product to disinfect your PC, well lets just say I have plenty of food on the table for the family. It's a catch-22. As much as I hate them for doing what they do, they keep me busy during the day and make me quite a bit of money all the while attempting to eradicating them.

I have several customers that pay me to reformat their computers MONTHLY because they can't stay away from the porno. :1orglaugh

isnt this zango all over again. if it has shot up to %5 over the past few days, wouldnt there be news articles?

ah so maybe thats the reason my sales have gone downhill...:(

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.

:(

let's bump this thread...

@ Sperminator - I am posting this on a well known mgp webmaster board

Sponsors have to be in a real pickle over this one.
If they terminate the accounts they suspect are spyware, then instead of the spyware replacing the affiliates code on the joinpage, the spyware people will just replace your join page with another programs join page, or replace it with a site of their own.
So if they do nothing they keep the traffic, but their affiliates get fucked.
If they terminate the accounts, they lose the traffic, and the affiliates still get fucked.

TGP and MGP owners need to post links to cleaner programs on their front pages and educate their surfers about this shit. That's the only real way to slow this down IMO.

you are no player dog, I would crush you. I can't stand your neverending negative banter. You would have to be the biggest disgrace to jews yet. Fuck off!!!!:winkwink:

lenny, the spyware programs work best when they are invisible (or barely visible). They play games like changing linking codes, redirecting on join pages, etc. It's all in a day's work.

If they start directly taking traffic away to other sites at a noticable level (ie, conversion drop off really bad... wait, that is already happening) then the programs will have to start looking into WHY.

If the affiliates get poor conversions but the program is doing well, that should be a tip off the the programs that they are victims of spyware.

You also have to remember that codec installers are often not interested in that specific surfer, but rather to use his network connected PC to spam others. There are many ways to play the game, not all of them as direct as you might think (like keylogging passwords for bank accounts, perhaps?)

fifty 1...

from Ukraine ??

you be surprise that alot of hacking spam etc comes from the USA too

sponsors are raising payouts, doing holiday competitions and happy hours, giving free hosting , submitting galleries for sponsors - they are wrong by doing this.
sponsors need to address issues like these. this is serious stuff.

every new member I get I go to statcounter and use the ip address I get in ccbill and see where the sale came from. I would know if they were using my site for this the very first time it happend. I also email affiliates who want to know what site sent their sale. Since I know the sites sending the traffic I would see it as soon as it happens. If it ever did I will make a post with all the info and you can eat them up

Yep on the years of this shit, it is just worse now and more sophisticated. Sometimes it is hard to check your sites several times a day everyday. Then there is the matter of missing something bad. Can't be a guru in all aspects of the industry. Some tools to detect and block the shit would help.

Started IP and domain blocking with .htaccess but soon realized that was gonna be out of control. So not a real or total answer to the problem.

bump, this subject should be taken seriously

you made me hungry :(

let's sombody makes some sort of site where we can submit all of the sites that contains some sort of illegal stuff.. video codec downloading, hitbots etc...

Spyware/adware is starting to become a huge problem for both adult and mainstream internet business. The only way to make this problem go away is to make sure each surfer has adequate protection installed. We need a good free program that users can get from a safe site.

Thanks! Happy to talk to you!

This is only one of a multitude of possible problems with my proposed approach... if, for example, we are running various specials for affiliates and the monitoring software doesn't know about it, it would also trigger unusual pattern detection, and I'm sure there are other possibilities (such as very sophisticated algorithms in the malware designed to evade detection) that would make this difficult. However, I do believe that sponsors who put the energy into it can come up with some ways to combat and limit this sort of fraud, even if it isn't 100% eradicated.

Honestly, though, I would like to believe any sponsor who is on his game would know something about the affiliates who are sending larger amounts of traffic. If the malware is in fact sending/stealing a substantial number of joins, then that affiliate should be noticeable... and if the sponsor asks questions and gets evasive answers, that, combined with whatever information can be had from statistical analysis should provide a reasonable indication of which affiliates are the likely problems.

I can also imagine a scenario wherein something akin to a handshake or checksum or unique identifier could exist between the ad, the affiliate who placed that ad, and the software (such as NATS) at the receiving end, such that if the click comes through, but with a mismatched handshake or checksum, then the software can identify the join as stolen. Of course, there's no existing mechanism for that within current affilate marketing technology, but that sort of trusted-source handshaking technology certainly exists and it shouldn't be too difficult to adapt it for use in the adult industry.

Yes, it's a pain, but this industry is remarkably adaptive and I suspect if the crooks are getting to be a big problem, it's just time for the sponsors and affiliates to work together to find a solution.

Google has teamed up with StopBadware.org to do just that... if Google results turn up a page with malware on it, Google inserts a warning page when you click on the result that warns that you might be visiting a page with malware.

See http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-08-03-n78.html

This is the main reason i turned off all my tgp trade signup pages.

As for my affiliate program, I usually ( or try to ) chat daily with lots of my affiliates and know who sends what.
I would be the first to can someone if I caught someone trying to fraudulently fuck with one affiliate sale.

what affect will this have on seo?

Is there a sponsor program for this spyware thing? Sounds very interesting.

Is there any chance that one day you will be less predictable... or less of a moron... either will work...

Interesting stuff

Here is an example of Google doing that using a Gammae site.
http://www.google.com/search?q=ysbweb
I would bet MSN have a nice little collection of things that would be interesting to see. Anyone here running their own honeypots yet?

ROFLZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!!!!!!!!!11111!!!!!!!!!!!!

you should be a comedian, seriously!

Bump for more discussion. Scary shit to say the least. Might just be the reason conversions have sucked balls.

I've seen non-adult forums flooded with that kind of shit :Oh crap !!

why does it not surprise me that the scammers are from the ukraine? nothing but thieving parasites there.

The biggest issue is that many programs still see decent conversions, and don't see that anything is wrong. But I suspect that a good look through the stats would find that normal affiliates are suffering with fairly poor conversions, while a few accounts are suddenly seeing better than average numbers.

There isn't as much motivation for the programs to look into it, because the sales are still there.

Fake codecs and other misleading sales techniques are killing things.

Sponsors should be able to spot these accounts quickly, especially if they are only re-writing on clicks to the join page. Either way, it should be easy to spot and ban from a sponsor perspective.

The problem is that most sponsors don't give a shit about affiliates. Just look at what AFF has done with Zango and allowing their ads on password/file sharing sites/torrent sites. This is up to the sponsor to stand up and not allow these affiliates into their system.

Yet another reason I only trade traffic with myself. :mad:

Anyone that installs that kind of shit deserves a good ass kicking

bump to the top....

What pisses me off about it, is that the Feds are chasing most of us over the 2257, instead of going after the C P and the shit like this.

Nothing can be done to completely eliminate this problem.
Think about the following:

1) Removal programs / Cleaners will not be effective at cleaning this up. They will only be able to remove DETECTED files. This accounts for a small sample, and well known methods such as public codecs. It is very likely they use these files for public spreading, and then update to an undetected version or addon that performs the actions you are stating here.

By the time the malware is detected, there is already 5 more undetectable versions out. Any good malware has built in update features which will update to the latest version to keep from losing traffic. It is insanely simple to re-pack the new malware with any # of packers out there, or make small changes to slip detection once again.

2) End users are ultimately responsible, wreckless use and poor education increases the magnitude of the problem. Poor security such as patch management, lack of any sort of antivirus software or spyware detection software adds to the problem.

3) Sponsor's need to drastically crackdown on this type of spyware. If there is no money being paid out, or it is too difficult to make money with these methods, the scammers will move on to greener pastures. I think what it comes down to is the sponsors looking the other way because they make their money either way, it is the affiliate who takes the hit. It is alot easier for them to look the other way, then to spend money to develop and implement methods to fight this type of fraud.

4) There is alot of money to be made. Whenever this is the case, expect people to do anything they can to take advantage. It seems this industry is ripe for the picking right now, and it will only get worse as more scammers learn of these techniques to make easy money.

If anyone has copies of any malware, I wouldn't mind analysing them and posting the results I find. Including traffic origins, ref codes, sponsors targeted, and more.

Send me a pm with a link to malware.

In this context that doesn't help you at all. The problem is one of infected PC's whose owners are just as likely to visit one of your sites as they are sites engaged in third-party trading...

^^quoted for emphasis^^

Some sponsors may need to have some pressure applied to get their collective asses in gear over this. While they might not have an instant solution available, they can certainly utilize their affiliates to help track down who is spreading these type of trojans, what sites they are being distributed on, and share information with other paysites/processors about which affiliates are the 'cheats' or are suspected cheats whose traffic needs to be watched more closely. If sponsors would cut the money off from these twits this problem could largely go away within a week, at least for those responsible for this current batch of trojans.