Affiliates

The Problem With Affiliates (2)

On Friday I mentioned spam coming from a BarkBox affiliate programme.

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The Problem With Affiliates

If I see BarkBox I think Spam.

That’s because, despite their marketing team effort, facebook and banner ad budget, the main place I see them advertised is via spam in my mailbox.

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Affiliates can be liable for fraud

An article popped up on LinkedIn about a recent 2nd court of appeals ruling that I thought was interesting.
White Collar Crime.
Back in 2011, the FTC and the state of Connecticut filed suit against a company called LeanSpa and their affiliate marketer called LeadClick. LeanSpa sold various diet products through negative option marketing. LeadClick was the affiliate company they used to help drive traffic and customers to their websites.
LeadClick and their parent company was included in the suit because the FTC alleged that they were aware of and facilitated the false claims made by their affiliates. The case went to court and LeadClick lost. They appealed to the 2nd Circuit court. Last week the 2nd Circuit Court upheld the trial court’s finding of liability for LeadClick.
In its press release for the case, the FTC says:

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Affiliate mailers struggling

What are affiliate mailers?

Affiliate mailers collect email addresses and then rent access to those addresses out to 3rd parties. There are a wide range of vendors that fall into the affiliate category. Some vendors compile lists through co-registration, others compile lists themselves through website opt-ins and some affiliate vendors fulfill mailing requests by hiring affiliates. There are, of course, some senders in the affiliate space that don’t even pretend to send opt-in mail, they just buy, compile or harvest addresses and blast mail to those addresses.

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Payday loan mail

Mickey has a great story of what happened when he gave a lead gen company his email address. Over 200 emails in 2 weeks from companies that seem unrelated to the signup company.
It’s this behavior by PayDay senders that causes their mail to be filtered and has caused many, many ESPs just to prohibit that kind of mail on their systems. It’s very much the ugly underbelly of email marketing.

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TWSD: Mail known spam trap addresses

One of the things we all “know” is that if spammers get their hands on spamtrap addresses then they’ll stop sending mail to those addresses. This is true for a lot of spammers, but sadly it’s not true for all.
I don’t think it’s any secret that I consult for all types of mailers, from those who just need a little tune up to those who want me to help them avoid filters and blocking. During some of these consulting projects, I use my own spam folder as research and provide information on the spam that I am receiving from them.
A few years ago I was working with a company who hires a lot of different affiliates to send acquisition email. A few of their affiliates had really poor practices and they were trying to figure out which affiliates were the problem. I handed over a number of mails from my personal spam traps, in order to help them identify the problem affiliate.
I told them, and their affiliate, what my spamtrap addresses were. And, for many years I stopped receiving that particular spam. But, over the last few weeks I’ve seen a significant uptick in spam advertising my former client.
I’m certainly not trying to convince anyone that handing over spamtraps is a good thing. But there is at least some evidence out there that they’re not even competent enough to permanently remove traps. I really have to wonder at how sloppy some marketers are, too, that they’ll hire spammers and not at least hand over a list of addresses they know are bad addresses to mail.
I really thought spammers were smarter than that. I am, apparently, wrong.
EDIT: Of course, mailing this spamtrap gets them nothing but a little ranty blog post here. It doesn’t result in blocking, or disconnection from their ISP or their ESP or anything else. I suspect if there was actually an affect, like, say, I started forwarding this mail to Spamhaus or other filtering companies, they might stop mailing this address. Anyone want a 20 year old, slightly used spam trap?
 

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Spammers already abusing Vine

Spammers have already figured out how to abuse the new twitter video service (VINE) to make money. I wish I could say I was surprised, but spammers (and scammers) are some of the earliest adopters of technology out there. They adopt it and try to extract as much money as possible before the property owners can catch up and implement anti-abuse technology.
Too few companies actually build products with anti-abuse technology built in. This costs them and the victims money.

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The challenge of Gmail

A lot of my sales inquiries recently are about getting good inbox delivery at Gmail. I’ve mentioned before, I can usually tell when an ISP changes things because they suddenly become the subject of a great many phone calls.
In this case, Gmail seems to have turned up their engagement filters and is sending a lot more mail to the bulk folder. I have also noticed other people are blogging about Gmail delivery problems. Al eventually determined that it was mailings sent from other IPs that were degrading the delivery of his customer’s emails.
Gmail, more than the other major ISPs, seems to not be weighting IP reputation very heavily these days. They’re looking at domain reputation and they’re using all mentions of a domain in that reputation. A lot of senders, some of them spammers, segregate their email streams (acquisition, marketing, transactional) across IP addresses in order to stop poorly performing mails from harming delivery of other emails they’re sending. But Gmail’s current filtering scheme seems designed to focus on domain reputation and minimize the impact of IP reputation.
This is making the Gmail inbox tough to reach for a lot of mailers these days. Even in cases where the mailer isn’t hiring affiliates or actively partitioning mail, if a domain is seen frequently in spam then delivery for that whole domain is hurting. Signing with DKIM and publishing a DMARC record may help. But the reality right now is that there doesn’t seem to be a silver bullet into the Gmail inbox.

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Internet fraud and private whois records

The Verge has a long article about Internet Marketing and how much fraud is perpetrated by people who label themselves Internet Marketers.
It was interesting, but I didn’t think it was necessarily relevant to email marketers until I saw this quote from Roberto Anguizola at the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection.

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More legal problems for Boris

Boris Mizhen is once again on the wrong side of legal action. This time it’s not as simple as Microsoft suing him for creating hundreds of thousands of accounts to try and game the spam scoring system. Instead, he seems to have run afoul of the FTC.
This case isn’t obviously about email, but the FTC alleges that companies under the “control or influence” of Boris set up a network of fake news sites to deceive consumers into a free trial for diet supplements. The free trial involved enrollment in a monthly renewal program which cost consumers up to $158.00 a month.
The websites did not make the enrollment process clear and the companies made it extremely difficult to stop the renewal.

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AARP, SureClick, Offerweb and Spam

On Tuesday Laura wrote about receiving spam sent on behalf of the AARP. The point she was discussing was mostly just how incompetent the spammer was, and how badly they’d mangled the spam such that it was hardly legible.
One of AARPs interactive advertising managers posted in response denying that it was anything to do with the AARP.

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