Why I HATE brokered offers - A Merchant's Perspective

mont7071

mont7071

WF Premium Member
Feb 10, 2009
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Portland, OR USA
As a merchant running a CPA offer, the biggest hassle I have to deal with is affiliate fraud. For this reason, I deal only with large, established networks that have an incentive to keep their publishers under control. Unfortunately, the fraud protection offered by any network is only as good as its weakest link. The dirty little secret with a lot of these bigger networks that use so-called "state-of-the-art affiliate fraud detection" is that they broker and allow other (less desirable) SUB-networks with lower or nonexistent standards to sign up under one umbrella account, which can hide alot of fraudulent leads when its mixed in with other sub-affiliate leads that are legitimate.

It's frustrating as a merchant to see my offer listed 20 different places on OfferVault when 1) I have no relationship with 90% of the "networks" supposedly running my offer, and 2) I have given CLEAR instructions to the large networks to not allow any brokered sub-networks, yet in some cases its clear that the majority of the leads these large networks are producing is from subs that they have never vetted themselves.

It's bad news for affiliates because, even if you are a legitimate traffic provider, if you are in a "bad neighborhood" sub-network, you are likely going to get your leads scrubbed too when the fraud is found because that sub-network isn't playing by the rules, through no fault of your own. Too often the network just tells you "Sorry, the merchant didn't pay us, they are the bad guys, not us" when that is not the case at all.


Moral of the Story for Networks: ask yourself, what value do you really add if 90% of the CPA leads you are sending to a merchant's offers are coming from individuals that you don't know and that have never signed up directly with you?
 
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Just say, no brokering or cross publishing. 50-70% of our merchants ask for this. Pretty common practice. If it gets on a network than no one knows who's running the deal when there is issues. So you have to really trust the operation. If you're timid about having your deals brokered, just say no.
 
smaxor said:
Just say, no brokering or cross publishing. 50-70% of our merchants ask for this. Pretty common practice. If it gets on a network than no one knows who's running the deal when there is issues. So you have to really trust the operation. If you're timid about having your deals brokered, just say no.
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And if you say "no brokering" just to find out someone is brokering, follow the redirects. You'll know relatively quickly who has broken your trust.
 
If a sub-network is adding value, then they should work directly with the Merchant. I'm not hating on smaller networks per se, but more the larger networks with the big name that brag about their sophisticated fraud detection, which means nothing when they will let any other smaller network send them traffic for their middleman cut, traffic which could be coming from fraudsters, and the large network would never know since they didn't vet the smaller network's affiliates themselves.

When its an individual bad affiliate, fraud is usually easy to spot; fraudsters are inherently lazy and tend to have noticeable patterns. The problem is, when you have 500 leads a day coming from Big Network A, who have Smaller networks B,C, and D feeding them all those leads. Sub-network B and C may be completely legit, while D has no anti-fraud systems in place and is 90% fraud affiliates with stolen credit cards. If it wasn't subbed/brokered by A, then D would be caught immediately as a direct referrer, but when its mixed in with all the legit ones from B and C, its harder for the merchant to catch, and when they finally do, it appears that 30% of all traffic from Network A is fraud. Merchant ends their CPA program or even refuses to pay, and legit affs in Networks B and C are hurt through no fault of their own. Big affiliates start to realize (as is happening a lot lately it seems) that they might as well go direct anyways, they aren't protected by the "big Network" anymore now that networks are withholding payment when Merchants refuse to pay them, and everyone loses.
 
Why not just have network A pass on the affiliate id as a sub id and then track it on your end? If you see a certain sub id/aff id is sending a lot of fraud you can just tell the network to remove the offer from them.
 
ayzo said:
Why not just have network A pass on the affiliate id as a sub id and then track it on your end? If you see a certain sub id/aff id is sending a lot of fraud you can just tell the network to remove the offer from them.
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This is actually how I do catch them most of the time, (I see familiar-looking sub id/aff ids that are associate with reported past fraud orders), but it doesn't excuse the network allowing it in the first place when a Merchant has specifically prohibited brokered/sub-networks, and its hard to do on the fly when there are hundreds of orders coming in a day, and most of the fraud/chargebacks don't get reported till 30-45 days later, in the case of stolen credit cards.
 
brokering of offers kills 90% of the offers out there in my opinion.

Very few businesses benefit from offer brokering except for the networks involved and even then if they become known for shitty traffic they will run out of clients
 
mont7071 said:
As a merchant running a CPA offer, the biggest hassle I have to deal with is affiliate fraud. For this reason, I deal only with large, established networks that have an incentive to keep their publishers under control. Unfortunately, the fraud protection offered by any network is only as good as its weakest link. The dirty little secret with a lot of these bigger networks that use so-called "state-of-the-art affiliate fraud detection" is that they broker and allow other (less desirable) SUB-networks with lower or nonexistent standards to sign up under one umbrella account, which can hide alot of fraudulent leads when its mixed in with other sub-affiliate leads that are legitimate.

It's frustrating as a merchant to see my offer listed 20 different places on OfferVault when 1) I have no relationship with 90% of the "networks" supposedly running my offer, and 2) I have given CLEAR instructions to the large networks to not allow any brokered sub-networks, yet in some cases its clear that the majority of the leads these large networks are producing is from subs that they have never vetted themselves.

It's bad news for affiliates because, even if you are a legitimate traffic provider, if you are in a "bad neighborhood" sub-network, you are likely going to get your leads scrubbed too when the fraud is found because that sub-network isn't playing by the rules, through no fault of your own. Too often the network just tells you "Sorry, the merchant didn't pay us, they are the bad guys, not us" when that is not the case at all.


Moral of the Story for Networks: ask yourself, what value do you really add if 90% of the CPA leads you are sending to a merchant's offers are coming from individuals that you don't know and that have never signed up directly with you?
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Can you outline which networks in your opinion are "bad neighborhoods" We all know PKM is one, any others that come to light?
 
Seema said:
Can you outline which networks in your opinion are "bad neighborhoods" We all know PKM is one, any others that come to light?
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I wouldn't call out any specific network w/o proof they were knowingly looking the other way; I don't believe any of them accept fraudsters on purpose, but the more sophisticated fraudsters become, the better they are at gravitating to the networks they know don't have systems in place to detect them. Smaller, hungrier networks (generally speaking) tend to be more vulnerable because they are more willing to take a chance on a new affiliate who seems able to produce traffic/commissions

Scenario: Fraudster applies at mega-network A, gets rejected by A's systems. Fraudster knows that Mega-Network A accepts brokered leads from Smaller network B, who in turn accepts subbed leads from Tiny Network C. Fraudster applies to B, gets rejected. Applies to C, gets accepted. Now Fraudster has found a backdoor way to run their fraud in Mega-Network A, and is now even less likely to get caught now then if Mega-Network A had accepted them in the first place.

As mkrongel correctly pointed out, this is how/why the majority of offers end up getting killed IMO.
 
zany zoroaster said:
Bro-hams, if you want to trace who has brokered an offer without your permission, then put the end network's aff link into http://wheregoes.com
I created it specifically for this situation. If you need a hand with your detective work, then send me a PM.
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Or you can use live http headers firefox plugin and get the same results. I like the clean display of URLs on your site though.
 
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