Someone here actually got sued? (26)
I must to say there is something that I don't understand.
All those whatapp update / anti virus / tech support and rebills offers are so shady and I always see some crazy landing pages
that affiliates (including me ) just rip each one from other like a virus that spread in seconds without knowing the consequences of that.
The advertiser is probably safe or at least he knows what he is doing and have back up plan with lawyers and offshore company , the affiliate network of course transfer all the liability to their affiliates (read the TOS) I can't blame them but if someone will sue them they will point to the affiliate who did it.
We can buy anonymously domains and hosting but in the end they can track as in a second with the affiliate tracking links, so it doesn't matter.
Few weeks ago the FR credit sweepstake was really hot (RadioPlanets and other brands who have the same concept)
one affiliate created a news page that looks like one of the most popular news site in France - http://www.latribune.fr
Of course he made tons of money it did convert well in the back then, just a bit later all the other affiliates started to promote this offer and few weeks later :
http://www.latribune.fr/technos-medi...as-464904.html
First of all it shows how much powerful is what we do few weeks and we make big damage to big market (France - 80M PPL) so they write it in the news I have heard that it was on the TV news as well in France, but on the other hand if you read this article I must to say it is frightening , They call us hackers that are doing fishing .
I just imagine affiliate who is just starting out , spy a little bit on France ads thought to him self that this lander is nice and run it for few bucks he might even wouldn't make it profitable yet , but bad luck and he becomes the Scapegoat - Boom latribune.fr sue him for 1M euro for reputation damage.
This scenario may be sounds bit extreme but I don't see why it couldn't really happen.
I think this is really important subject that affiliates ignore but it does exist .
So my question is what do you think about that? how do you protect your self (if you even do)
Do you knows affiliates that got sued for anything they run?
People have gone to jail for less than that, like very misleading diet scam and hidden charges (even if you disclose them in the fine print).
That's straight up fraud, no one in their right mind would attempt that unless they lived in some shithole country where you can hide from the law. Otherwise they'd quickly get a visit from the FBI or equivalent.
It's already happened to someone here: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...0-for-doing-AM
These are highly illegal activities, and anyone who downplays the risk of criminal prosecution for such activities is being painfully naive or outright stupid ...
The best way to "protect" yourself is to not just go there at all.
You will also sleep better at night, knowing that you are not the kind of person who will do anything just to make a fast buck, especially things that cause tremendous, needless harm to your fellow humans beings by misleading them.
Just read the panicked comments from ordinary folks on the website (http://www.latribune.fr/technos-medi...as-464904.html)
- commenr on fait pour arrêter ces prélevements mon copain vient de se faire prélever 85€
- J'ai été moi même prélevé de 49 euros
- pareil pour moi comme un con j'ai rentré ma carte bancaire !
- Je suis en panique total reponder moi svp je vien de metre le numero de la carte sans reagir est ce que je devrai faire opotion a ma vrate tt suite ke se passe til par la suite stp
- comment fait t on quand on sait fait avoir et en plus debiter de 46e95 bonne de con
You are better than this.
Guys who are running fraud on a bigger scale don't generally cashout to personal affiliate accounts linked to personal bank accounts 
But yea, a newbie affiliate starting out might get into hot water if he's in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Were they promoting a sweep PIN for an iPhone 6 or doing pishing? From the comments people got charged like a regular PIN, but the "advertisers" said they had to pay $1 to participate.
Anyway, running PINs is legal if you don't try to impersonate authority sites/brands and don't lie about only having to pay $1 to get an iPhone, but getting the chance to win. You can't use the word free (in Fr is illegal), but at the end of the day everyone running sweep PINs is not honest. The conversions would be 0 if you promote the offer as "Participate for a chance to win an iPhone 6 by being charged $50 on your phone bill". You could argue that the offers have the prices listed, but let's be honest, they convert only to people who don't read that.
That's straight up fraud, no one in their right mind would attempt that unless they lived in some shithole country where you can hide from the law. Otherwise they'd quickly get a visit from the FBI or equivalent.
I"m getting very conflicting info here, Force Factor runs 100M a year in rebills, they're ok, but other rebills aren't? Anyone have specifics on this?
Originally Posted by cmdeal
Does this also apply to testimonial pics? If so, whats the work around for that? I'm still relatively new to AM and certainly want to do my best to mitigate risk. Running email submit with testimonials.
Originally Posted by malachii
Kevin Trudeau was found guilty of defrauding hundreds of thousands of people out of $37million
[..]
'He has treated federal court orders as if they were mere suggestions ... or impediments to be side-stepped, out-maneuvered or just ignored,' the judge said.
Trudeau's weight-loss book describes a grueling, 500-calorie-a-day diet, as well as hormone treatments. The deception, Guzman explained, came in Trudeau's infomercials that misrepresented the contents of the book as laying out 'a simple, no hunger... diet-free method of losing weight,' which enticed more people to buy the book.
The feds will probably act a lot quicker next time - and another scammer will rise, inevitably.
The current batch of diet rebills, like Garcinia etc, are merely useless and scattered across various merchants, so they probably won't get raided until they become a real nuisance/hazard, or if the feds simply get bored and look for something to do.
Closest thing I found was Perry Belcher (Ryan Deiss's buddy) who got a ten year suspended sentence (as in, never went to jail), but he was impersonating Doctors and lying about FDA approval.
Again, does anyone have any concrete example where weight loss claims or rebill practices landed someone in jail? (in the US specifically?)
I know some Garcinia/Green Coffee guys got all the assets taken... but that's very different from CRIMINAL charges.
Not to beat a dead horse, just wondering if someone has some insight.
Lots of lawsuits all the time. Many you just don't hear about.
Tread lightly. But even more then that I understand many of your are newbies just trying to make a quick buck. Please consider what you're potentially doing to the rest of the industry when you make decisions. A lot of the compliance issues on traffic sources are derived from people that are pushing the boundaries and being too aggressive. Which in turns end up fucking it up for all of us. I'm sure 99% of you don't care but I really wish you would. This industry is amazing, can you imagine if we didn't have the nightmare of dealing with Facebook that we do now? It's primarily driven by people being super aggressive and greedy. I plan on being here another 20 years please leave it nice for others.
Originally Posted by malachii
If there is a pen-pushing bureaucrat that has their attention set on "cleaning up an industry" or worse targeting you & sending you to jail, they will use whatever they can.
Plus, It's bad enough getting into the courts system if you're the plaintiff!
I'm trying to avoid those kind of stuff as well but I must to say that sometimes it looks like it is not possible to make money without pushing the boundaries.
Maybe it is just me but I don't think so because everytime I spy on ads 99% of the ads are illegal .
Originally Posted by lior_o_o
Originally Posted by lior_o_o
Your definition of illegal may be too strict.
Originally Posted by auditor
As far as I can tell you can make claims and have continuity products without any issues, just as long as you don't piss off your customers.
Force Factor seems to be the model here with $100M a year in revenue in 4 countries and an A+ BBB rating.
That's kind of my reasoning at least, that they tend to drop the hammer on people that are dicks to their customers, not necessarily the "weight loss + rebills" people in general. Or am I totally off and we should all stay away from that space?
The FTC is like Facebook: driven to protect user experience.
They don't go after you because you have some misleading ads or a rebilling product. They go after you when you defraud, mislead and upset US-based customers who in turn complain about it.
If you have a rebilling product and push the boundaries in terms of ads (while not blatantly misrepresenting your product, using fake testimonials, etc.) and in the end your customers love the product, you'll probably be fine. If Kevin Trudeau's miracle cures were actually legitimate (lol) he would certainly be in a different situation.
Actually, I'm not entirely sure you would experience any trouble if you had an amazing product that no one complained about. I'm not sure if the FTC even cares about advertisers who aren't defrauding/upsetting customers.
I'm a bit scared. Newbie affiliate marketer here, what should I avoid doing to potentially get sued? I've heard bad things about facebook so i'm avoiding doing that.
Originally Posted by zeno
This only matters is you're the offer owner though, if you're an affiliate you have 0 control over that stuff.
Smaxor (or anyone else with insider knowledge) do you think that diet rebills with FAIR cancellations/refunds and low complaints would draw the wrath of the FTC? Would you promote it?
Originally Posted by auditor
By your logic, the lesson to be learned from someone who goes to court for a traffic ticket and then tries to beat up the judge when he's found guilty should be that getting a traffic ticket can land you with a felony where you would spend multiple years in jail.
As a side note -- anyone who goes to jail because of contempt of court is seriously a new level of stupid. It's not like they caught him on a technicality like Capone not paying taxes, this "criminal mastermind" went to jail because he was too stupid to follow the court's instructions. Let's not glorify anyone needlessly eh?
Originally Posted by timtetra
My point was this: just because you can "get away with" something, doesn't make it right.
And at the other end of the scale, there is getting too worried about whether or not people will look disapprovingly or what people might think.
For the purposes of the OP's question: there is illegal (against the laws of the country) and there is non-compliant (going against the rules of the company you are doing business with).
eg: Google doesn't like antivirus banners that say: "your phone is infected". Ok, but it's not illegal. Google is big but it is not the judiciary of every nation of Earth. Not yet anyway.
But I digress: the point being: it is important to understand the difference between these two words.
Isn't it mostly advertisers (as they should really, weight loss rebills are pure scams) that get sued, not affiliates?
I think affilaites are mostly safe because what people are the most mad about isn't that they got tricked by a fake testimonial or fake website, it's because they try to get a refund from the advertiser and the advertiser can't be contacted and just keeps their money. At that point most people probably forgot about the affiliate landing page and just want to go after the advertiser that "stole" their money.
It's whoever has money to recover from a lawsuit.
Don't believe me? Then keep at it. After all--by your thinking--you won't get caught.
Had some minor incidents, including:
Getting a C&D e-mail from some Turkish government agency after running adult dating there, having forgot to activate the whois guard This was back in 2012. Just swapped domains and kept going. Haven't heard shit since. Appearently porn is illegal in Turkey. rofl.
Getting C&D's from lawyers representing various newspapers for 'borrowing' their headers to boost CR on rebills. Stopped doing that after that happened a few times. Not worth the headache. Nothing ever came of it though.
Got a C&D from WhatsApp for using their brand name in a domain i had. They didn't say anything about any advertising though...
Have had a few PIN Submit offers go down after the government regulator's spotted my ads/landers. Regulator shuts down the billable DB of users and sometimes shuts down other companies offers within the same niche (eg Antivirus or WhatsApp Wallpapers).
Nowadays though it's more on the nicer side of things. Unless there's an advertiser who wants traffic at any costs and approves running aggressive stuff for a promise of $X/day in volume.
My retarded mind is under the impressions that, in general, if some government agency or big brand want's to sue you, they will most likely sue the product owners. Like in OP's post, RadioPlanets will most likely catch the heat from the affiliates promoting their offer illegally. Think of it this way, Coca Cola hires an ad agency to market their soda. The ad agencies' campaign ends up being illegal or offensive in some way. Coca Cola is gonna be liable for that since they hired the ad agency and approved it. Same with affiliate offers, they are approving you to promote their product, and it's their responsibility in the end to make sure that their product is being promoted in a legal way. That being said, it won't stop the offer owners from suing you because you broke the offers restrictions.
This thread also made me think of this old gem: http://www.nickycakes.com/ftc-hits-e...-plus-bentley/
It's a bit different if Coca Cola can proof that they approved an "Open Happiness" campaign but the ad agency ended up running "Drink 3 Coke a day and you will lose 5 kg in 2 weeks - Guaranteed!" behind their back - simply because they were paid in rev share. First they would come after Coca Cola, but eventually they would definitely go after the ad agency (most likely both: Coca Cola and FTC).
Originally Posted by pandabear
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