Wanted to be sure forum owners and mods are aware of a growing problem. Black hatters are teaching affiliates a relatively new way (or at least only recently openly discussed way) to stuff hundreds of thousands of cookies on forums. FYI for those that aren’t aware, cookie stuffing steals commission from honest affiliates that should have gotten the sale. Cookie stuffing is not new - it’s this new method of doing it, that I am talking about.

I just discovered the problem at the 5 Star affiliate forum a few weeks ago. I researched how they are doing it and now we are catching a growing number of affiliates trying this unethical way of making sales. We’ve been banning them right away, but after catching another cyber crook today, I decided it’s becoming a big enough problem that we needed to set up a rule for it. So we added to our forum rules: “NO COOKIE STUFFING ALLOWED - Any type of cookie stuffing or cookie dropping (setting a cookie without a user generated click) will result in an immediate ban - no warning, no questions asked!”

For those that don’t know about cookie stuffing, it’s a way of loading cookies onto unsuspecting surfer’s browsers. The surfer never clicks a link or ad on an affiliate’s site or in the case of forum cookie stuffing, there is not even a link to click. They just get a cookie planted they never should have gotten.
It is OUT AND OUT STEALING!

For newbies that don’t get it or gray hatters that think cookie stuffing is OK, here’s a scenario. Let’s say you are doing PPC to drive traffic to Wealthy Affiliate for example. You PAID for a visitor, who then clicked to your site, is interested, clicks over to WA and likes what he sees but does not join.

Later in the day your potential new customer visits a forum and some black hat trickster secretly loads HIS cookie on YOUR customer’s browser. Your customer never clicked the black hatters link, visited his site or read his presale copy. The black hatter did NO ethical work at all. That night your customer goes back to buy. It should be your sale. You caused the last legit click! But the black hatter gets the commission. YOU PAID for that visitor - the BH did nothing to earn the sale - just stole it from you.

I’m not telling anyone here how it’s done because I don’t want to teach anyone how to do it. I can give forum owners a little heads up about how it’s done. It frequently happens like this. You have an existing thread about WA, eBay, Amazon or some other popular affiliate program. The black hatter will usually post a very innocent sounding post like “I’m a member of Wealthy Affiliate too and I’ve gotten some good info from it.” He won’t even sound like he’s trying to promote anything, because he doesn’t need to convince anyone to click his link - there is no link to click! You won’t see a link or anything else that would alert you that he’s cookie stuffing. There’s an easy way to catch these guys, but I doubt you’d ever even think of it, if you didn’t know that you should be suspicious.

I use Wealthy Affiliate in these examples because that’s what some of the cookie drops we’ve seen are for - but that’s probably because since we have an affiliate forum, that would be a popular option for our members. If you have a computer forum they are probably dropping Buy.com or eBay cookies or something.

If you own or mod a forum and would like to find out how you can catch black hatters and prevent them from stealing affiliate commissions on your forum, email me with the subject “Cookie Stuffing on Forums”.

You may also want to add something about it to your forum rules. We added: “NO COOKIE STUFFING ALLOWED - Any type of cookie stuffing or cookie dropping (setting a cookie without a user generated click) will result in an immediate ban - no warning, no questions asked.”

FYI this method also would be SUPER easy to do on blogs, blog comments and social media sites too, so keep your eyes open.

Added later: Have gotten some Qs from folks. No it’s nothing to do with iframes.