Why Are Affiliate Marketing Scams On The Rise? Faisal Abidi Reveals

As the pandemic made people shift to the online work mode, most businesses opted for affiliate marketing to promote their products and services. Affiliate marketing is performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought in by the affiliate's marketing efforts. However, it's an effective way to promote products and services with less cost, effort, and time. Because of its high ROI, companies spent millions of dollars on affiliate marketing, which attracted fraudsters to steal the money.

As affiliate marketing scams and fraud are impacting businesses, we talked with Faisal Abidi, Co-Founder of RNF Technologies, to learn more about the ways adopted by scammers and possible measures one can take to prevent oneself from these affiliate marketing scams.

• Cookie Dropping

It is an affiliate marketing scam used by fraudulent in which they drop third-party cookies on the user's browser. When the user visits that website again, the dishonest will get the credit without investing time or effort in bringing the lead. It is done without the user's knowledge or consent, which again is a scam to the user.

• Click Fraud

Many websites and online platforms host promotions and are paid for by the companies who promote hosting their ads. The payment schemes depend on the number of visitors to the site who click on the ads. According to Faisal Abidi, such scams that go by the name of click fraud, occur when an ad is clicked without any interest in buying the offered product or service.

• Transaction Scam

In this scam, the fraudster completes the transaction using the stolen details of any affiliate partner's credit card. This scam affects the advertising company and also the affiliate partner. Also, once scammers trade a person's account information, that person becomes more vulnerable to future scams.

It doesn't end here. The retailers face loss from all sides, as they lose their product, have to pay the affiliate partner, and pay credit card chargebacks.

• Fake Lead Generation Scam

As pointed out by Faisal Abidi, in this type of scam, the fraudulent will send fake leads to the advertiser to fulfil the numbers and get their commission. The scammers steal the details of other people and upload them on the contact pages of these businesses, who then consider them as leads and pay the affiliates. It's challenging to figure out the difference between the actual leads and these fake ones for the retailers.

Apart from these, affiliate marketing also involves URL hijacking, spoof traffic, and google ad hijacking as scammers' most commonly used methods. Let's discuss a few ways by which one can protect themselves from these affiliate scams.

• Approving your affiliates manually may sound like a time-consuming process, but it's crucial for your brand and products. Before agreeing on your affiliates, do a background check.

• Keep a regular check on your data to see if there's any potential fraud using the URLs, and IP addresses, identifying the trends and behavior of the hike of your business.

• You can avail of specific affiliate fraud software solutions to track your affiliate marketing.

In an ever-growing world where people are shifting to digitization at a higher rate than ever, it's necessary sometimes to step back and look at what's happening around you that could hurt you and your business. It's good if you haven't faced any scams or fraud, points out Faisal Abidi, but you never know what could happen next.