Found! Tube site affiliate scam

[2muchmark2]

Hi Everyone,

I thought I would share a little experience I just had with a Tube site. At least one tube site owner has reached a new low. Here's what happened:

A couple of days ago I was pouring over the numbers and I couldn't balance. Why were my regular sales high but my payouts to CCBill lower than they should be? I could not reconcile my net sales properly and my figures were off from 30 to 50%.

I had almost given up since I was so tired that day and was about to chalk it all up to fatigue, when I decided to check my affiliate reports. I noticed one affiliate in particular had sent a nice number of sales my way. I was happy to see it until I clicked the transaction link, and saw that one of these sales was an existing customer. "Damn!" I thought. "There goes an unnecessary commission payout, but oh well."

I then click another transaction number and saw that this too was also an existing customer. Then another, then another!! As it turns out, ALL of the transactions from this affiliate were existing customers.

How did this happen? These customers have been on our site for years now. Why was I suddenly paying commissions for their repeat business?

I decided to ask my customers, and they told me they were INVITED to this website. As it turns out, this tube site may also have been stealing our content by taking taking a girl into private chat, copying the video and adding it to his tube site. He was then contacting our customers via our forum and inviting them to his tube site to see the content. When our customers entered the tube site, the CCBill affiliate cookie was then deposited to that users browser. When they returned to our site and spent more money, the tube site owner received the credit and the commission.

And not just for 1 or 2 sales. For 91 Sales...!!

The Tube site is called FuzzTime dot com.
http://www.networksolutions.com/whoi...h/fuzztime.com

If you have an affiliate program, I urge you to pay very close attention to it. This kind of affiliate fraud is something that I never would have suspected would happen, but now that I think of it's such a simple scam any scumbag can do it.

[2muchmark2]

Wow... 8 hours and no response?

[softball]

its a great post. Well spotted, Mark

[2muchmark2]

Thanks Rhet!

I hope no one else gets scammed in this way.

[MRock]

very shitty scam ... sorry to hear it happened and glad you caught it. I never got an affiliate program off the ground on my sites, so I have no need to worry.