Got caught up in a little detective work today as I was chasing a lead on a blog story. Then I realized I don’t really have the time or get paid for playing detective, so will just throw what I found out there as a word of caution. Internet fraudsters can be so creative. I don’t envy affiliate managers and network quality assurance people that have to research and approve new affiliate sites and investigate this crap. We’ve talked recently over at Shawn Collin’s private affiliate manager forum about MySpace and how merchants and/or affiliates are using it for marketing, so I thought this info may be of interest to some affiliate managers.

I hope managers and networks always make time to investigate once an affiliate has a huge spike in traffic out of nowhere. From what I can tell the owner of this scam has a legit site that most managers would probably approve. But look what he’s doing to get all this traffic. Check out these stats. He’s gotten almost half a million visitors in 10 days and part of that was from almost 300,000 visits in just one day. That must mean he’s making some pretty incredible earnings on all the CPM ads he’s showing in his little MySpace worm fraud game and I bet a few people are clicking on his Amazon links too. However some of the sites that the worm message was spread to were down - so either they buckled under the traffic or were shut down by the host. Scott Schiller scoops the story on his Yahoo 360 blog:

Yahoo! 360° - For Your Consideration - The latest Myspace “worm”: 100K+ hits to a page with affiliate ads Oh and of course, the purpose of all this? To get tons of hits on ads. There are ads served from amazon.com and revenue.net. I’m sure they’d love to know that they’re paying someone to show their ads to hundreds of thousands of myspace users who were expecting “something cool to happen” with their profile.

I swear, some people will do anything for impressions, clicks and revenue. I agree with Scott that this was a pretty ingenious, yet simple way to game MySpace who should have safeguards against this type of thing. I was going to post more on some things I discovered but I guess I will stop here. I would rather not give the baddies any new ideas. :-(