Affiliate Marketing Scams

Affiliate marketing is a sales technique that businesses use to increase sales through third-party publishers. The business offers commissions to affiliates as a way of compensating them for marketing their products. Aside from sales, online businesses also use affiliate marketing to increase traffic to their web pages, social media posts, videos, etc.

Many legitimate companies have affiliate programs. The process goes like this:

  1. Spammer signs up for many affiliates programs
  2. Spammer sends millions of emails with image and links to their site
  3. Link redirects through multiple servers to be able to redirect to another site as their sites are continually taken down
  4. The user clicks a link on the spammer’s site which contains the spammer’s affiliate ID and is taken to a legitimate company site
  5. If a user purchases the item, the spammer is paid a fee, often 10-15% of the purchase price

Some Common Types of Affiliate Marketing Scam Email
Fake products/ service

Scammers create advertisements of websites for fake products and promote them under a well-known brand’s name to gain trust.
Real affiliate
Fake referral

Fake leads or referrals are sent to companies to gain more commissions.

Get-Rich-Quick Schemes

Scammers use convincing ads to show people that they can get money quick without much effort. This brings a lot of traffic and usually attracts affiliate marketers who will bring more clicks to affiliate links.

URL Hijacking

URL hijacking is when a scammer uses a brand’s popularity to redirect people toward a website where they earn commissions through affiliate links. 

Frequent spammers are usually blacklisted on many email platforms, that’s why some scammers are spoofing email addresses to bypass spam blacklists.

  1. Spammer signs up for many affiliates programs
  2. Spammer sends millions of emails with image and link to their site
  3. Link redirects through multiple servers to be able to redirect to another site as their sites are continually taken down
  4. User clicks a link on spammer’s site which contains spammer’s affiliate ID and is taken to legitimate company site
  5. If user purchases the item, the spammer is paid a fee, often 10-15% the purchase price

How to spot affiliate marketing scams

Learn to recognize affiliate marketing scams as you come across them. Here are some common red flags:

  • Poor quality or stock images
  • Too much advertisement
  • Long and poorly done texts
  • Endless redirections and pop-ups
 

To check if the website or affiliate program is legitimate, try searching for keywords on Google and seeing if the website appears on the top pages. Google checks the quality of the websites and web pages that appear on the first page, so you can trust that it will rank legitimate websites first. 

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