How to stop affiliates from scamming your affiliate program

(My Original Blog Post: http://ping.fm/GNmsu)
You know, it's funny, before I owned my own affiliate program I was always concerned about the affiliate program being a scam. Now I'm finding out through trial and error that there sure are a lot of the affiliates out there that will do anything and everything in their abilities to scam affiliate programs. It's kind of ironic, isn't though?

How do they scam affiliate programs?

Well, the easiest way for them to do so is by owning multiple e-mail addresses and knowing how to manipulate IP addresses so it looks like they are signing up a new unique individual each time when they really are the same person. It's usually someone who doesn't have a real stake in the affiliate program with nothing to lose.

Don't believe me? Here is an example affiliate program scammer I recently caught signing up multiple accounts in my affiliate program under multiple affiliates.

You'll notice how similar the e-mail addresses are and also the IP addresses a very similar. This is a sign of an affiliate scammer in your mist.



Let me quickly go over some affiliate program essentials that you should have to protect yourself against fraudulent sign ups online.

• A confirmation link in initial sign up e-mail to confirm affiliate accounts so they don't use someone else's e-mail address.


• Require the affiliate to manually log into their account before they are approved.


• Manually approve all affiliates so you can check for any fraudulent activity.


• Make sure your affiliate program checks for unique IP addresses


• Look for similar names when someone signs up, could be a sign of the same user signing up multiple times.


• Make sure your affiliate program can quickly and easily manage and check through all affiliate sign ups for duplicates because sometimes you'll miss some.


• Affiliates that sign up with weird names that don't make sense like (bat man, super man, spider man) these are probably scammers.


• Building a relationship with your top producers is a good idea because these are the ones most likely to sign up the most fraudulent sign ups at times.


• Requiring your affiliate program to accept e-mails as user names is a good idea because that way only one unique e-mail address per affiliate can be used.


• Make sure the terms and conditions of your affiliate program note that fraudulent sign ups will be deleted and that all affiliate sign ups are approved according to your terms that the affiliates must follow in order to be accepted.

Your affiliate program might not need all these safety credentials if you don't offer any incentives for affiliates signing up, but if you do, then it is a smart idea to protect your affiliate program from scamming affiliates.

I use Post Affiliate Pro 4 to manage my affiliate program. Don't worry, I don't have a Post Affiliate Pro affiliate link to promote them. I am a real customer of them and they are who I use. I chose them because I knew designing my own affiliate program from scratch would take forever and that I would have a whole bunch of security loop holes I would have to learn the hard way without them.

After discovering how many affiliate scammers there really are out there, I am proud to say I really did make the right decision to go with a professional service. Otherwise my affiliate program would probably be out of business by now with all the fake sign ups I would've had to have paid by now.