Affiliate Marketing Arrest

Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online. But there are downsides, as well. The most common is called affiliate marketing arrest, or fraudulent activity. Many affiliate marketers have been caught out with this kind of thing, but what is the "line" if you are being accused of something? How do you show that you aren't guilty?

There are many gray areas in the world of affiliate marketing. Some affiliates go overboard trying to sell, while others don't even realize that they are promoting products that don't support their business goals. In some cases, affiliates get paid for promoting products that will not be used. If an advertiser is promoting a product that has no real chance of being bought, then this is flagrant spamming.

Affiliate fraud can be a nightmare for the person committing it. Criminal charges and significant loss of income can occur if you are found guilty. In fact, many affiliate marketing fraud busts result in the removal of the fraudster's license to promote. This means that the marketer could be shut down his website and lose all of his affiliate commissions and regular customers. So how do you know whether or not your activity is criminal?

Some affiliates will brag about their huge commissions and will tell you about the amounts of traffic that they are bringing into their affiliate networks. They will tell you about sales figures that are practically unbelievable. It is easy to see that their over bragging may be because of the fact that these sales are probably not real. If the affiliate marketing system is giving them a steady flow of commissions, it may not be worth pursuing, but if the earnings are based on unrealistic commission earning amounts, then this is certainly a red flag.

Another common method of affiliate marketing is to promise a large commission and to sell something that you don't even have or need. For example, if an affiliate network is selling digital products, an affiliate marketer might promise to sell a CD when he receives his commission. This is considered a gray area by most affiliate networks because there really isn't anything that the seller needs. The products come with little or no customer service issues, which can be a problem for customers who value that type of service.

Other affiliate programs are strictly money laundering operations. They pay their affiliates based on referrals, and since affiliates work on commission only, they have no responsibility to refund any money that they send to the company. Since a company doesn't care about customer service, they aren't likely to do anything about people making referrals to them. There is also a good chance that they will run into a couple of customers who are trying to defraud the company by sending fake money.

The bad actors in affiliate marketing fraud are the ones that lie to the customers. This includes sales people that claim to be updating the product list if the affiliate marketer's customer support software isn't updated. It also includes marketers who say that they can send the customer's email to the support staff of the company if the product order has already been made. Both of these statements are lie, since neither the support staff nor the product are included in the order.

Bad affiliates can earn very little money or even make a living doing nothing but spamming the companies that affiliate marketing for them. Bad affiliates can also use their influence to get their affiliates fired from affiliate marketing networks for things such as market research fraud or cookie stuffing. These bad actors are also accused of hacking into affiliate marketers' customer database. This type of infidelity is illegal and should be avoided by all means. It costs the company a lot of time and resources to investigate and to track down these bad apples, so they tend to let them go.