I recently met a blackhat marketer pushing garcinia.
His lander impersonated a well known company such as PG&E or Walgreens indicating that this trial is a giveaway program sponsored by these impersonated companies.
I know this is illegal. This is straight up fraud. I warned him about this but he casually brushed it off saying, "The most you can get is a Cease and Desist. With these small numbers (less than a million a month), no one is actually going to take actions except for sending CNDs. If I receive a CND I will just shut down my domain and move on to another domain with another advertising account."
I am not considering his strategy. I do see some logic in his arguments.
Does anyone here think he could end up in jail? What about being indicted for a felony?
Btw, his main targets are first world countries such as Australia, Norway, Finland, Sweden and the UK.
I would probably consult with a lawyer in regards to this one bud.
You can certainly get lawsuits, jail time, fines, etc. This type of strategy can open you to legal actions far worse than just an C&D slap on the wrist. It all depends on how far the original company wants to pursue this and if your actions are causing any type of consumer complaints against this company. This is not much different to selling a rolex when it's in fact a fradulent copy that you are calling a 'rolex'.
He, you or others may get away with this type of strategy.. for a while.. but eventually you will get caught and it only takes one incident to crush you.
LOL, these people come and go. Don't be stupid like them.
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...ill-good-press
These things are very unlikely to happen, but they do happen from time to time - check the article cmdeal linked for you. People take the risk because the returns can be big, but I surely wouldn't want to be used as a sample to scares other and face the consequences.
It also depends on how many firewalls there are between you and said campaign.
If you cooperate structure is utilizing countries that don't care about FTC/domestic complaints, plus you're paying for domains with BTC from a burner laptop using TAILS/etc... and basically do a bunch of other OPSEC/ track covering, I'd say you're in the clear.
That said - is all of that hassle/risk/unethical behavior really worth 30% or so extra ROI?
30% or so extra ROI?... add another 0 or two
superlee1028, your friend is right. 99.99% nothing is going to happen as long as he's under the radar and if he's really making 7 numbers a month, then its worth the tiny risk he's running.
Anyways if he sets it up through a foreign LLC, then the tiny risk is even tinier.
I'm not a lawyer - and I would very very very much back up the suggestion that you should talk to a lawyer on this - but to me that looks like, as you say, it would be classified by the courts of most countries as fraud.
Given it involves things being posted, the USA might well treat it as mail fraud. (There's a legal history of stretching the definition of "mail fraud" to breaking point.) If not, it's on the Internet so is probably classified as wire fraud.
Both mail and wire fraud carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, as well as maximum fines in the $1m range.
Most other countries have similar levels of penalty. 10 years in jail in the UK, 5-10 years in jail in Australia, etc.
Again, I'm not a lawyer, but I don't believe that running this through a foreign LLC would help much if the authorities do decide to go after him. I don't know enough to say whether this is likely, but even if he lives in a non-Western juristiction I'd suggest he had a long conversation with a lawyer about the chances of extradition.
Given that he's impersonating brands with the clout to push prosecutors to take this pretty seriously, I'd say he's running a fairly major risk. He just needs one person in a legal department somewhere who's having a bad day and decides to call the cops rather than just sending a C&D...
On paper you are probably right, in reality half of the industry should be in jail then if these rules were applied according to the book.
Agree with above - pretty much every pop lander on Adplexity is impersonating Google, Facebook or some other recognized brand
Unfortunately, unless you do all of the shady things you don't stand a chance against everyone else that does it, because they will outbid you and do whatever they have to, to get conversions at the super low payouts networks give.
@bradh_ That's an interesting point. However, the precise details of what you're doing matter.
There are a lot of pages on Adplexity that are using design elements from well-known brands. That's still not something I'd advise (design rights are a thing, etc, etc) but it's very different to fraud.
The key things in the OP's description that really made my hair stand on end were that the black-hat in question was directly, rather than by implication, claiming that his ads were from these companies, that he was doing so in connection to a service that sends things through the mail system, and that this was a paid rather than free service.
I didn't, on a first glance, see any other pages on Adplexity's recent, highly-trafficked landers that fulfill all of those criteria, and very few that fulfill even one. That's not to say there aren't one or two people risking it, but it's not common practise.
Using design elements from Google, and even making your lander look like a Google Play page, is the kind of thing that might get you sued, but it would be at Google's expense. That means there'd have to be ROI in it for them, which means it's pretty unlikely.
But make those few changes and you're in a situation where you've done something that might get you put in prison, at the US government's expense. And the department that would be paying for that does not make the same sort of ROI calculations.
Once again, the summary is talk to a lawyer.
It'll cost you a few hundred dollars and could save you 20 years in jail.
Seems worth it to me.
BBC: "So... what are you in for?"
You: "Uh... I used Dr. Oz on my landing page."
BBC: "What the fuck is a landing pa... Never mind, you'll make a great prison bitch."