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Affiliates Indicted For Cookie Stuffing and Ebay for being idiots

I picked up this story from following Shawn Collins twitter and went over to read http://www.revenews.com/kelliestevens/affiliates-indicted-for-cookie-stuffing/ 

What I find amazing is this

”

  • Between 2006 and June 2007, Shawn Hogan (Digital Point Solutions) earned approximately $15.5 million in commissions from eBay. Hogan was eBay’s number one affiliate.
  • Between 2006 and June 2007, Dunning (Kessler’s Flying Circus) earned approximately $5.3 million in commissions from eBay. Dunning was eBay’s number two affiliate.
  • Hogan and Dunning are accused of generating hidden forced clicks on both their own web sites as well as sites not connected with the defendants in order to increase the number of computers storing the eBay affiliate tracking cookie.

    • ”

    WTF – who was the affiliate manager? They paid out $20.8 million without knowing where the sales were coming from ARE YOU KIDDING ME. Commission Junction were the affiliate network. CJ were you sleeping on the job AGAIN? I hope CJ paid back the $20.8 million plus their fat commission check they got on top of their big sales numbers, what a joke.

    Commission Junction do they know what they are doing yet? Have your say!

    CJ were either
    A Negligent and stupid – therefore so should pay back the $20.8 m plus commissions

    B Deliberately and complicit so as to collect their commissions – therefore so should pay back the $20.8 m plus commisions and go to jail

    C Other?

    8 comments on “Commission Junction ARE YOU KIDDING ME – Affiliates Indicted For Cookie Stuffing”

    • Allan says:

      Wow – I found it interesting that the #1 affiliate was so far ahead of the #2 affiliate. Nevertheless, the numbers are mind-boggling and should have raised some pretty big red flags. You figure that they’d at least do some research and understand what made these two affiliates so successful. You’d want to train others too so they could have a similar level of success.

      Because they didn’t train others to emulate success, they MUST have been complicit. Right?

    • Allyn says:

      CJ was riding that gravy train all the way until Ebay dumped them. It’s obvious.
      Anyone in the biz knows that it is VERY easy to visit a site and run a script to verify if you got stuffed. Are you telling me CJ didn’t do that? BWAHAHAH!

    • Alan Petersen says:

      This all happened between 2005 and 2007… soon thereafter eBay dumped CJ and brought their affiliate program in-house. Looks like now we might know why. 🙂 $20+ million of allegedly fraudulent commissions paid out is a good reason to bolt.

    Comments are closed.