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Went Hot: December 16, 2007 - 9:11 am
Posted By: SEMSpot 297 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.shoemoney.com)
Category: Yahoo
22 Comments
Went Hot: December 16, 2007 - 9:11 am
Posted By: SEMSpot 297 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.shoemoney.com)
Category: Yahoo
22 Comments
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Comments
Omfg ... the Yahoo! lamers. They waited for PubCon to pass to save face and they the applied sudden death. Sooo pathetic! Backstabbers.
Shoemoney emphased the PubCon on purpose and they backed out immediately to 'wait out'.
Damn!
Wow! Just Wow!
Yahoo: many of us are dealing with legit issues out here - you aren't listening!
BTW - what is the "partnership through CJ" ? I know what CJ is, but I'm not familiar with Yahoo's involvement with CJ. Thanks.
See now I don't think there's anything wrong with someone removing an affiliate who is providing them with 65% fraudulent sign ups. I doubt Yahoo's merchant account provider is happy with them having all those fraudulent sign ups and they probably have no other choice.
I would do the same as they did. How can they continue to allow it to happen?
I would say the same thing, if that was truly the case, but it's surely possible that some organization is targettinga high profile blogger to filter fraud through. And Yahoo should be able to detect that - otherwise I could theoretically kill all competitors sites just by hiring a few out-of-country teams to commit fraud through.
If they can't figure out affiliate fraud, why should I trust them to filter PPC fraud? Or search spam for that matter. Seems soo 1990s.
Exactly my thoughts Tim, who is to say you cannot target someone and attack there YSM account with fraud charges. Yahoo needs to be able to detect such activities and fix it on there end, I mean they even admitted that he was not at fault. I wrote an article about this on my blog in regards to sabotaging someones YSM account in the same manor I feel happened to Jeremey. I just hope I am wrong about the idea and that it is truly not possible to do. If it is possible though, oh boy would that open a huge can of worms. That hole that Yahoo has would need to be filled and fixed quickly by them or other high profile YSM accounts could be shut down using the same tactic.
@jill-
Did you even read the article? Are you that dingie you think the answer is to just kick out people instead of fix the problem?
and here I was thinking that even with no search engine, at least Yahoo! has YSM. Damn. Just a $299 per listing directory now?
Yes, shoemoney, I did read the entire article, as well as the comments.
Obviously, for Yahoo it was a cheaper option for them to simply remove you as an affiliate. They are a business and have to do whatever works for them.
"surely possible that some organization is targettinga high profile blogger to filter fraud through."
Possibly the sources of traffic SM was leveraging are the problem??
Banned by the ODP, now banned by Yahoo.
Seems to be some sort of pattern emerging.
Nevertheless, they were crappy about making it sound as if there might be some hope to work out the problem AFTER Pubcon..They were saving face like5ubliminal mentioned. They could've atleast tried to use the methods mentioned in the closing of the post. Strange indeed that they didn't. Fishy.
Great article and comments. In my opinion, it is always up to the company to filter fraud credit cards, invalid clicks and other stuff. Otherwise, shomoney can be just collateral damage because some guys decided to try some credit card numbers that credit card generator generated to them and accidentally picked the Shomoney site as an entering point.
@TimDineen
Yahoo offers some of its services through CJ. For example, if you can find advertisers for them you can earn commission.
He's sending through 65% fraudulent orders and got put in the 'I don't have time to deal with this crap' pile. Then blames this on Yahoo? Seems to me he was actually given some warning and an opportunity to fix his own traffic generation techniques and instead of fixing it decided to first shift the blame to Yahoo, then turn his poor performance into a linkbait opportunity.
Yahoo's not the problem here. Affiliates that send through that volume of horrible traffic get terminated, where's the surprise in that? But we're not likely to to see Shoemoney holding up a sign in front of a hummer anytime soon that reads '65% Fraudulent Orders!'.
@ Jill
Are you nuts! Thats like saying you fire your "best car sales man" because he sells cars but the clients all have bad credit ... You just don't do that ... thats not the sales guys fault ... not with your number 3 Publisher!
You resolve the issue however you have to. Take him out of the CJ program and put him in a in house program ... or anything other solution. You just don't can one of your top performing affiliates and then get all THIS heat they have to be getting now!
OK, this is a huge shock on the level of massive stupidity from Yahoo! on so many levels I don't even know where to start.
First, ShoeMoney has obviously become a victim of a reputation attack like the one launched on CastleCops a couple of months ago.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2007/09/the_danger_of_reputation_attac.html
Whoever did this probably sacrificed a very tiny percentage of their pile of stolen credit cards to whack ShoeMoney's account and may turn their attention to one of his other accounts now that this one is down.
Second, Yahoo must be the biggest bunch of idiots on the planet if neither they nor their credit card processor aren't capable of basic fraud prevention and now that the cat is out of the bag anyone using Yahoo! Stores or anything else where Yahoo is involved with payment processing for your business should RUN to someone that can properly so the job.
Hell, I did anti-fraud validation software for a couple of big clients and stopped most of the nonsense dead in it's tracks so it's not rocket science.
Does Yahoo even require the CVV2 values or put some form of captcha or bot blocking on the signup page to stop automated attacks like this?
Probably not from the sound of it and now anyone wanting to play with Yahoo knows it's open season on YSM so let the good times roll!
Lastly, who gives a shit about the referring URL?
The IP address that made the transaction and the email address used plus some other "tells" in the header of the HTTP request were probably sufficient to filter out the fake transaction if you know what you're doing.
I'd suspect most of these transactions came from proxy servers or compromised PC's in a botnet, both easily determined, but Yahoo apparently doesn't know how.
So much for scoffing at us hard nosed bot blockers until it happens to you, eh?
First, ShoeMoney has obviously become a victim of a reputation attack like the one launched on CastleCops a couple of months ago.
Actually, that's not obvious, to me at least. Even if it is, that seems to me to be Shoemoney's problem to fix on his end, not Yahoo's. Just like it's his problem if it's not a rep attack. You get paid for the traffic, therefore you're responsible for it. Pretty clear cut to me.
@wheel - OK, maybe it's not obvious to you but I deal with this stuff all the time and it looks like a text book case of reputation attack.
Read my blog post explaining why ShoeMoney probably couldn't protect himself even if he tried. Automated attacks, which this probably was if it was 65% of his click thru sales, tend to not crawl through your server to obfuscate the source of the problem. They only needed to visit his server once, and since his pages are cached, ZERO visits are possible.
If you can explain to me how ShoeMoney can protect himself from a theoretically automated attack that most likely never crossed his server more than one time then you're way smarter than I am, so please elaborate...
I deal in bots and bot attacks all day long every day and I see no way that anyone other than Yahoo could've prevented this.
For starters, how do you know it's a fake credit card until they attempt to process it?
You have no clue from just looking at an IP address, assuming you already block bad IP neighborhoods, that the CC would be fake. You can firewall off some obvious locations that fakes tend to originate from, which Yahoo should've done already, because it's a huge undertaking beyond the scope of the average webmaster which is why I was shocked, actually stunned and appalled, that they would even ask such a thing of Shoemoney.
Let's see, you think that individual affiliate ShoeMoney's resources should be better at stopping CC fraud vs. large publicly traded mega-corporation Yahoo!'s resources?
Come on, Yahoo! should be able to handle this trivial problem with all their ecommerce experience.
If you can explain to me how ShoeMoney can protect himself from a theoretically automated attack that most likely never crossed his server more than one time then you're way smarter than I am, so please elaborate...
No need to be condescending. I'm not approaching everything from trying to sell a commercial bot blocking app like you are, so it's actually pretty simple from my viewpoint.
High volume low quality affiliate traffic person gets burned by stereotypical signals of the market they're in. Then complains like it's someone else's fault. I mean, I've got nothing against this guy, could care less. But it wasn't Yahoo telling him what places to go stirring around looking for traffic, or to build an inflammatory online persona. All his decisions, leading to the inevitable fraudulent traffic.
If you don't want to get burned by crappy affiliate traffic, try building good quality affiliate traffic.
@wheel - " I'm not approaching everything from trying to sell a commercial bot blocking app like you are" - Well dude, neither am I at the moment, do you see any link to any site selling a goddamn thing?
I'm explaining how it works, what I see, and why ShoeMoney probably had NO CONTROL OVER IT so don't be condescending when presented with the current state of affairs.
This has nothing to do with affiliate traffic crappy or otherwise because it involves stolen credit cards, which is a CRIME, possibly organized crime, as bogus affiliate and click fraud traffic isn't typically associated with server hacking and phishing which results in a nice pile of stolen credit cards, so you're mixing metaphors.
I'll say it as ecommerce software developer veteran, not a bot blocker, although both have a lot in common when it comes to protecting a site from CC fraud which I'm surprised you aren't grasping.
Wheel, you know I like you and I know we all have bad days but come on pal, get a grip on this one as it's YAHOO's fault.
Thank you, Wheel, you said it much better than I did.
What, he was wrong too? :)