I have started reading alot of ‘warnings’ that affiliates ‘need’ to cloak their affiliate links, especially with ClickBank’s hop links.

My question is this…
I fully understand the ‘how to’ cloak a link, but what I don’t fully understand is the prevailing reason ‘why’. I have read that it helps protect your links from being ‘stolen’.

If someone ‘steals’ my links and then uses it as their own, doesn’t that mean that I will still get paid on their work? If I ‘cloak’ a link by having a ‘middle page’ that redirects the user to the actual link, can’t the ‘link thief’ just ‘steal’ the cloaked link and use it?

I guess my question is: What is it that people are doing with stolen links that makes it so horrible?

You can probably garner my ‘noob’ status by this post.