Affiliate Fraud - Program Owners BAN these idiots!
 

Got two shit heals to report....

#1. This Affiliate is a carder.
Rampant Credit Card fraud and chargebacks from this guy.
Referrals are from a site that is not his.

Here is the info that I have:
Vitaliy Sworowsky
[email protected]
epassporte klikvip_341
Bogus postal address


#2. This Affiliate is stealing traffic via adware or a toolbar.
Referrals are from many sites that are not his.
This means he is STEALING your affiliates traffic and getting credit.

Here is the info that I have:
Kent Hall
[email protected]
Checks payable to Dean Arrow & Associates Llc
Bogus postal address


Look for the epassporte and the payable names to make sure no one is funding these assholes!

How do you know the second guy isn't just buying traffic from a broker?

We have 20 accounts with all different names, using Epass, listing "Dean Arrow and Assoc" as the check payable. But I don't see any real cb or refund problems.

Anyone else have any info?

To be more clear:
The referring URLs are from many sites that are not his AND they have a different (correct) affiliate code on the sites that belong to the true owner/affiliate...

In other words, none of the pages has the affiliate code for "Kent Hall"

Hijacking a browser is the only way I can think of to create this situation.
The referring URLs are correct and have good ads from valid affiliates.
This means an infected browser to me...

20 accounts?

That doesn't sound good :(

he isnt carding he is cheating your webmasters by stealing their joins.

cut off the scammer and i bet your real affiliates ratio's improve.

you should also pass along that info on those accounts to other sponsors.

wow fucking thieves thats why ratios are horrible all over the board.

nail the fuckers dirty d.

p.s. theres a thread on gg&j's regarding the second account.

they are theorizing the second address is a clearinghouse for russians to use an american address.. ( nothing nefarious , kinda )

this may also be true but i dont think rules out that they are pulling a scam..

using "fake" info would be a def reason to cover your tracks..

any more info on the second guy's would be great

in the second case, if he is paid by check and has a fake postal address, how does he get his money? does he change last minuite to epass or something?

Dean Arrow
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...oogle+Se arch

We have quite a few entries for Dean Arrow, ourselves (at least a dozen)... some of which get paid by check.

I remember there was some red flag or something tripped a few months ago in relation to that company, and, though I don't think I looked into it significantly, I remember being appeased, at the time, with the explanation that they're a brokerage firm.

I'll check into things a bit more in depth now, but, I don't think Rowan's question has been answered effectively yet. If people are convinced one way or the other on case #2, please hit me up in ICQ.

i got the dean arrow thing too. bogus info. pulling the raw logs now.

us too, we just banned them a day or two ago.

We have 8 Dean Arrow affilate accounts as well, although the only actibve one is fully legit promoting using free sites.

That Vitaliy Sworowsky we found and banned sometime in the past.

Thanks for the info none the less.

Matt

Fucking Hell.

i think sponsors need to look very close for the second type of scammer there.

if the ref codes dont match to referring page's url theres a problem.

I think many sponsor's quietly ignore this type of traffic because they don't understands how badly it hurts them.

scammer sends 0 traffic , all he does is skim your current affiliates sales. so at the end of the day the sales are the same either way.. BUT this affects your affiliates ratio's making you appear like a lame ducks sponsor and your affiliates move on to greener pastures.

cut the scammer off and your ratio's improve and sales remain exactly the same and slowly improve as real webmasters push more traffic because their ratio's improve

congrats to the winners

klikvip heh

A qwik google reveals a russian program

http://www.klikvip.com/

klikvip epassporte means Russian... just add to the script to ban them...

This is also why Epassporte is looking at implementing a system where klikvip affiliates can only get paid by them... Because no one ever vetted this persons data which is what happens when you get your Epassporte on your own and need to use a card to load it.

I think they should get rid of these accounts

20 accounts with all different names so no W2's

looks like dean is a big douchebag

We have had problems with Dean Arrow & Associates in the past and no longer allow payments to go through any non approved 3rd parties. Basically you are sending money to a 3rd party and then they send a check to your affiliate. Not exactly something I would want to do. I had some webmasters never get their money, beware.

Mark

Thanks for the post the 1st guy was an affiliate of ours and is now banned. I would also suggest not allowing any payments through Dean Arrow & Associates, see my post above.

Mark

We have a way to catch affiliates that change the affiliate codes in our links to their own, plus we closely monitor new affiliate applications, sales ratios, traffic sources, and sales patterns every day. I won't allow any affiliate to cheat another, period.

Steve Lightspeed

:thumbsup:thumbsup its good to know some sponsors keep a close eye on things still

:thumbsup for ethics

klikvip_341 is a carder, we caught him last month

Smokey... bridge contact with me on ICQ, if you would.

Is this the same guy as xxxaid.com ?

Can anyone confirm? I see he is a Python/Dollarmachine affiliate.

Thanks for the heads up.

I repeat that question. How do you know?

And people complaining about his multiple accounts .. do you guys offer some kind of tracking campaigns? He might have created multiple accounts in order to track conversion ratios of his different campaigns, since a broker must track his ratios.

ok we have a Dean Arrow And Associates LLC ... as an affiliate and actually just caught this earlier this week. he might be broker or whatever...but that still doesn't explain why the 10 sales he sent this and last period ALL have usernames that are EXTREMELY similar.... like all have some form of "cc" and a combination of numbers.

also forgot to add that they have 3 accounts ... with one account referring the other for the affiliate referral percent as well. so on MANY different issues they are in violations of our terms

BTW, Dean Arrow is a mail/payment forwarding agency, and it's a way for affiliates to hide their location and identity. (Austin Mark is another one, I believe).

We ask that all affiliates in our programs use their real name and address in order to get paid. I think it's prudent that we know *who* we are doing business with.

And, as a bonus, fraud seems to be reduced when we ask affiliates for their real info.

We don't allow Dean Arrow as a payout address. CG Pay Ltd is another that is disallowed.

take the account number off of your checks and use their contact info and your biz name only. Any real affiliate does not need the account number on the check.

that will stop sites like dean and mark.. they need the account number to know who to pay.

at that point, the scamming webmaster will have no way to get paid, and will be forced to move on.

i have 9 accounts with that name and looking at the different accounts nothing looks wrong with them. 8 of the 9 came from a webmaster referral - none of the webmaster referrals are from another 'Dean Arrow' account.

Not sure why there is ANY confusion with buying traffic from a broker!
This would not raise any red flags or cause me to post about a crook.

This has NOTHING to do with purchased traffic or tracking multiple campaigns.
Unless the traffic was purchased from a spyware company :321GFY

Ok one more time for the reading impared...

Brokers sell traffic to a landing page with YOUR affiliate code on it.
You buy the traffic and get paid on the conversions.

This is caused by an infected browser.
This means that a % of everyone's legit sales are going to this douchebag.

Please refrain from posting if you do not understand the basics of affiliate traffic. This thread is meant to inform program owners of a problem, not try to justify their behavior.

Dirty D doesn't put up with any nonsense.
My affiliates deserve the money they earn and nothing less.

Yeah, interesting how seldom bad affiliates ever get publicly exposed.
Program owners, please post info about the accounts you have banned.

When you have thousands of active affiliates, it is hard to police them all.
I would love to find some more crooks with the help of other affiliate programs!

Cheaters always lose!

Good thread w:thumbsupith some helpful info.

Same here there is no reason they should have to hide their identity like that.

Mark

I had 5 accounts from "Dean Arrow & Assoc, LLC"
all with different names and mailing addresses

Bump this back to the top!

wow so many scammers and sponsors thinking twice before banning them....wow, maybe thats the reason ratios are in teh shitter?

Had 2 for Dean myself...

99% of programs don't give a rat's ass about adware/toobars as long as someone brings in the sales.

It is estimated that around 30% of all PC's have some sort of undetectable Russian spyware (rootkits)

Yeah, its super easy to build a browser bar or a "Browser Helper Object" (BHO) that just intercepts every webpage request, scans the request for a pattern match on thousands of program's affiliate code structure, and does a string replace of the affiliate ID... everything else about the request is legit. They can often even change out the referring URL in the request headers to a legitimate page of their own.

Pretty hard to detect that... even harder to correct other than banning the douche.

I had lots of Dean Arrow and Assoc affiliates too, but never any problems!

Heya, please turn on your ICQ for a minute.

hmm.. we have 7 Dean Arrow and Assoc affiliates, wtf