FlowMark - Making Money Online

One of the many tools in the black hat box of online money-making is getting your competitors banned from one or more of their affiliate schemes. Whether that be Adsense, Casale, Mirago, Miva or some other click based affiliate network. They all track and monitor for fraudulent activity to make sure their advertisers aren’t being ripped off but what they look for is precisely what can be exploited by a black hatter:

Clicks
Ultimately it boils down to clicks and what those clicks ‘look’ like from their side. Some of the key points on these click fingerprints are:

• IP - The ultimate and the most obvious. If large numbers of clicks are coming from the same IP address you can pretty much guarantee their fraudulent. For those that don’t already know an IP address is like a personal ID for a PC or other network device.
• User Agent - The browser or other app you’re using to click that link with. Firefox, IE, Mozilla, etc. are all User Agents. So again as above if many are coming through with the same info here its dodgy.
• Cookie - Many of these services will provide a cookie which is also checked for whenever you return. If the cookie is found its likely this is the same person going back and forth. Fraudulent in other words.
• Timing - Unless the site is massively popular the chances of it getting 150 clicks in 20 mins on the same banner is highly unlikely.
• Conversions - How many impressions turn into conversions? If every impression on that Adsense block turns into a click then something fishy is detected and it’ll be flagged.

Attack
So attacking your competitor couldn’t be simpler - you do everything you SHOULDN’T do from the list above to your competitors site. Either manually with a web browser or using a web ‘robot’. Now I may be a believer in free knowledge but I won’t go as far as to show how to make one of those!

Affiliate Leads
Just a quick note about other affiliate schemes such as leads and sales. One way to exploit these is by submitting via the competitor site to his affiliates a slew of bogus and bad data. This will normally get you banned by the likes of TradeDoubler, etc.

Tags: blackhat, click fraud, tradedoubler, adsense