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Affiliate’s Fraud Detection & Prevention

Hello!I am Gaurav Sethi

What I believe Stay Clean or Stay Away

You can find me at:gaurav@viruspositive.com

@viruspositive

Agenda1. Why to Care & What it is ?

2. Industry Movements

3. Research Analysis with Case Study

4. Common Mistakes

5. Best Pratices

Affiliate Marketing &

FraudsSome Facts & Known Types of Affiliate Fraud’s

✖ Affiliate Marketing Industry to Grow to $6.8bn over Next 5 Years ✖ Approximately 15% of all digital media industry’s revenue comes from

affiliate marketing ✖ U.S. affiliate marketing spend nears $5B. That is twice the economy of

Belize.✖ In most affiliate programs less than 10% of affiliates drive 90% of traffic

and conversions

.

Quick Glimpse

W.F.A has described ad fraud as having the potential to become the

second most profitable form of organised crime in the world within the next decade, coming in second

only to cocaine and opiate trafficking.

Redefining Affiliate MARKETING Scenario

A business model based on Genuine Referral between advertisers and publishers accomplished with Revenue sharing. The goal is to increase the Net Revenue

Term Genuine referral is defined as the lead which would not have converted otherwise.

Different Types of Referral Methodologies Involved

✖ Affiliate Marketing ✖ Organic SEO ✖ Paid Search ✖ Direct Type-in ✖ Comparison Shopping ✖ Banner Advertising✖ Social Media

Is it Really working as defined in

1989?

Redefining Parasitic Affiliate Methodologies

“The number of infected PCs jumped some 106% during the holiday season's first shopping weekend and 118% above normal on Cyber Monday." The infections recorded was between Nov. 25 and Nov. 28, 2016.

The study in this presentation will revolve around the Malwares, Spywares, adwares, Junkwares.... developed with an aim to perform Advertisement Frauds.

We conducted a research on more than 1000 applications that are compatible with windows platform in the last 3 months.

And we found that over 45 % of the sample were involved in Advertisement fraud in a way or other.

In all findings, these apps reflected every (Referral) visitor to be authentic, but it is actually Parasitic .

The sample set compromised of: 1.Extensions/Toolbars/Browser Plugins available on Standard market place offering either of the feature listed below

✖ Enhancing Shopping Experience✖ Product/Price Comparison✖ Cash-back and Reward On shopping✖ Voucher/Discount Code

2. Utility Apps intended to enhance the User experience✖ System Cleaner✖ Browsers✖ Performance Boosters✖ Antivirus Products

3. Games

4. Search Enhancer/Translators

The Study

Parasitic Behaviour from Shop and Save Up On Internet

Explorer

Shop and Save Up is an adware program that is commonly distributed through bundling.

The Behavior-”False Click”

The Game Play

The Invisible Link

The Parasitic StrategyThe Strategy was to redirect the user on Amazon.de from Amazon.de through affiliated link !!!!

Is this Referral Worth Sharing incentive?

Parasitic  extension "iDeals Shopping Optimizer On Chrome"

iDeals is a browser add-on that makes sure that we buy the right product and pay less by offering us alternative products by showing the same products on different stores with cheaper prices.

The Behavior-”False Click”

Better Deal for the same product from the same Domain?

The Game Play

The Invisible Link

The Parasitic StrategyThe Strategy was to redirect the user on Amazon.com from Amazon.com through affiliated link !!!!

Is this Referral Worth Sharing incentive?

Parasitic  Game Blasteroids

Blasteroids is the third official sequel to the 1979 shoot 'em up video game Asteroids.

The Behavior-”False Click”

The Game Play

The Parasitic StrategyThe Strategy was to redirect the user on Amazon.in from Amazon.in through affiliated link !!!!

Is this Referral Worth Sharing incentive?

It’s Not just amazon

There are many more…..

Its just not Amazon… No one is immune to these Parasites

The Mistakes

✖ Referral Commissions is paid to affiliates for sales that would have happened on its own.

✖ Most of the prevailing solutions fails to identify these vulnerabilities.

✖ Lack of information available on the subject of affiliate adwares,spywares and shopping & Coupon plug-in to the affiliate Managers.

✖ Rapid release of the new breed of malwares, adwares, spywares intended to perform parasitic activities which makes the scenario more complex.

✖ Non-Usability of the heap of data gathered in the form of reports generated by current available solutions.

Mistakes

Best Practices

✖ Pre-Integration Review

✖ Post-Integration Review

✖ Regression Test Using the new breed of Adwares,Spywares & Junk wares

✖ Re-review of the Top Performing Affiliates

✖ Deriving action based on the data collected with programmatic solutions

✖ Creating clear set of Non-Compliance policy and enforcing them

Best Practices

A number of parasitic approach identified in other channels used for deriving traffic :

✖ Organic SEO ✖ Paid Search ✖ Direct Type-in ✖ Social Media

WHY & How ?

✖ There are parasitic software that allows you to place YOUR call to action over the top of ANY other branded page . So you can take Wikipedia, or Microsoft, or any other website and place your optin form, button, video, scarcity bar or clickable image on that website.

✖ New breed of Video frauds from expired Video domains.

Coming soon in AFFILIATE SUMMIT EAST 2017

Untouched Story

Thanks!Q & A