Fraud leads on cpl, deal with it? (17)
I did media buying to send leads to cpl and now there are abt 500 leads are claimed to be fraud and the affiliate network said that the advertiser is not going to pay so they will not pay me.
Let me explain the whole situation.
I was running traffic to a cpl offer and at 100 leads i tried checked on quality.
They said was quality ok as advertiser did not say anything, I was not stopped on the offer and continued to run the offer.
At abt 200-300 leads i checked again on quality just to make sure. Again, it was ok to run:
This was ran over period of 1-2 months. I didnt spike any volume and sticked to the cap.
Im not sure if they actually checked anything abt the quality, as now the AM mentioned that advertiser has many affiliates running the offer so has to split attention on them, so do not always check quality: so i what i think now is that they didnt check on my quality until now, in other words it seems that they are saying that the advertiser can check the quality whenever he wants, and even tho i specially requested, it was not checked.
The issue is that i specially requested for it. And if they checked it then, Maybe there was 30 fraud out of 100 and didnt pay it might still be acceptable. As they sent me a fraud report and fraud was already seen from the start. Which could be identified earlier.
But now they waited till this number of frauds that they tell me its fraud and not going to pay.
Is this fair that should i be the one that is not paid in this case?
They told me to get from traffic source a refund. Im still following up on that, its not confirm there will be any refund. But should it be compulsory that the affiliate network paid me even tho the advertiser did not pay out. Isnt that one of the benefits of using a aff network.
I have also send my tracker data and traffic source to the network as requested by them,as it shows that i really bought the traffic . But it seems like its no use
I felt that i did all i could to prevent such a situation from happening but it still happened. Was there anything that i did wrongly or could have done better?
It feels like from what I've read that that the affiliate manager didn't really do any quality checking. According to the fraud report how many leads did they deem to be fraudulent and how many did you send?
From what i see in the fraud report. There was 676 leads and and 366 have a red mark with a fraud conversion score on it.
And that should not be the actual numbers as there are more leads that was not shown on the report. im still trying to get a more accurate report from them .
In this case, i was running another offer from another network at the alongside this, and the leads there have already been paid. There was no fraud heard at all, but maybe could be they didnt check the leads about fraud.
If even it was really fraud, i was given the green light on it to continue, and it seems a waste of my time and money . Some other AM would automatically check quality and give me feedback, i didnt even have to ask which i really appreciate. Im not sure what should i do in this case, and it was really fair to me.
I would like to go down to each lead to identify why its fraud, is there somewhere i can check if the leads are really fraud? also please let me know how can i prevent such cases.
What is the traffic source? And would you mind sharing the network? That might help solving the problem.
And did they mention fraud only? Or do they use fraud as word for not saying the lead converts (bad quality). That is also a big big difference.
Fraud means bot traffic, or some other system pushing fake leads.
A lead can also be bad, as in not converting, which they give a label "fraud". I have experienced this several times so make sure the network is clear about this too.
As you described, it looks like they (network and/or advertiser) didn't really pay attention to the leads, while you asked for it during the journey. Maybe the advertiser did a "check", and communicated this to the network. In that case the network isn't that responsible too and they should demand payment from advertiser. Network or advertiser should pay (again, based on this info only). Let's hope the ones involved chime in too!
PS: very often with fraud cases affiliates getting kicked from the offer or network.
They didnt mentioned about bad quality, but this was the reason: "leads were tied with VPN and were made from same Ip's which indicates that leads were done manually using proxy. Non duplicate Ip's were also marked as majority of them were tied to high-risk characteristics like spoofing and other patterns that correspond to proxy and botnet activity."
Yes for sure, as i missed that out.
Traffic source was trafficjunky. Feedback from adult experts here was that they have not faced any issues with this source. But they are mostly running in the top geos. For this i was running in HK geo. Which i suspect could also be the issue. As i was thinking that there could be traffic from china users (as adult sites are blocked there) and might be using HK as a proxy location. But its just a guess, as seem like no one has experienced such issues from this source.
Affiliate network is clickdealer. I have worked with them since few months ago, and have received multiple payments already. This is the first time of non-payment. I have already provided them screenshots from my traffic source and also from tracker, which proves that i did the media buying.
Thanks for the help so far. Let me know of any suggestions !
Thanks for the explanation. Both companies you mention are quite experts and established for a while. Let us know how it evolves, both have reps on the forum too so they might read this too soon.
they dont have to see it from here, as they both are already aware of the situation. im actually looking for opinion as an affiliate prespective, how would someone experienced like yourself handle such cases . Or anything that i could improve on. Maybe is there something i can do right now to check the leads , or identify the problem to prevent such cases
Originally Posted by evohatch
For your situation, if you asked for regular quality checks and were given the green light, it's pretty clear you should be paid in full and if they don't actually like the quality, pay you so far and kick you from the offer.
I had similar situation with Clickdealer. Advertiser said that on the weekend anti-fraud system was turned off and it counted fake leads as approved.
On the end they rejected like 80% of my leads.. But I didn't ask for quality check. But still, imo it was their mistake which made me scaled campaign on the weekend and wasted more $$$ than I should. I have similar opinion to you that the job of the Network is be some kind of protection in cases like this.
We as affiliates put our own money on the line, account managers don't. This makes a big difference in the approach IMHO. If they didn't tell you the quality was good, you wouldnt scale or maybe even stop the campaign. Now you are in shit because they were way too sleepy on this. It's a common mistake with CPL offers, I have experienced this multiple times when working for different networks. People see their bonuses coming close so yeah. Network and/or advertiser should be more careful. @alice_cd
Regarding the case, industry is huge and different scenarios might occur. So in your case I would recommend just to make a conclusion and go forward. On the one hand Clickdealer is not trying to steal the money, most likely they were not paid as well. On the other hand they have provided you a green light to drive more traffic so they take partial responsibility on that. I believe it would be wise to have a skype call and discuss the case and agree share the loss 50/50. If not just ignore it and keep working since these 500leadstroubleshooting can take a lot of time which you could spend on making more money.
If the network confirmed everything is looking good, at the very least until that point, it's a communication issue between them and the advertiser - unfortunately the way things work now, affiliate networks don't take many risks no more in most cases, if an advertiser charges back, they just forward... used to be different in the good old days.
If you've got logs of the AM of the network confirming that the advertiser confirmed everything looking good, you should *at least* get those leads paid. If the advertiser doesn't pay those leads to the network, it's not your business - it's part of the network to cover you in such a situation as well.
What I think might have happened - since the affiliate manager is freerolling, he confirms your quality without even checking or without even having any feedback. If things turn south, oh sorry, the advertiser didn't pay us. Happens more often that many people might expect, simply cause a lot of affiliate managers are just lazy and eager to get their commissions.
Talk to your AM, if there's no way to find a solution, ask for someone higher up the chain who can actually say yes or no - trying to find a middle way which limits the damage for both sides is usually the way to go in such a situation.
Originally Posted by natifico
Why there is noone from clickdealer to deal with this case?))) lol
Thanks for the comments everyone, it really gave me more confidence to support my claim. Over the past few days, I have tried my best to fight on this. I have emphasized that i checked quality multiple times, and permission was given to send more leads. I would have stopped traffic if they had done the quality check when i requested, and this issue would not have happened. However, the results of discussion have not changed. The end result is that they do not pay out as it is fraud traffic.
"we work as any other affiliate network - if your leads are marked as fraud we don't pay.
https://gyazo.com/e766357f2e3c26ba80021f5095a66af0
these are Terms you agreed to when signing up with us. "
The solution provided to me to solve this is to ask traffic sources for the refund, which i am already on it, but this is not a confirm thing.
I have also tried to request for the more details on fraud report, as the number of leads they are not paying out does not match the numbers in the report. The fraud report shows leads highlighted in red, for some of those, they wrote there "proxy" but some do not have the reason. Hence, i wasn't able to know the exact problem for each ip address, and also do not know which were the final ip addresses that they are not going to pay out. Am i supposed to just believe that the final figure of fraud leads they sent me was correct? My request for more fraud details and additional reports was not met, it cannot be provided to me. Is there any reason that they do not want to provide this?
I found this website https://scamalytics.com/ip/isp/qualitynetwork where i could key in each IP address to check. Using the previous fraud report they sent, I tried to check some the IPs that they put a red mark on. Some were VPN but they were also some that had no fraud detected at all. I only did for a few of them for check, and im not sure if this website accurate? Or are there other way that i could use to check on fraud?
Please let me know if you have some advice on what i could do next
Hey @All - Apologies I didn't chime in here sooner, I usually catch when ClickDealer is mentioned or someone pings me - keep in mind, a global pandemic kicked off right in the middle of this post going live so perhaps why this forum post was missed! However, we also do not comment on open investigations while they're ongoing - so for now, will have to talk to the affiliate in question before I can give more insight here.
@evohatch I know our Affiliate Manager has worked to resolve this with you and even though we were not paid, we did compensate your costs (At least half the leads payable) despite it being flagged as fraud by our partners. Many networks would have closed your account and moved on, I do appreciate your concern and some of the points you raised here. I will reach out personally and we can connect on this issue and see if I can help resolve any open issues or concerns for you - will reach out ASAP!
In regards to 'catching fraud' - as you all know its a complex and complicated issue. Sometimes its pretty advance/complicated strategies, sometimes its someone filling out forms and masking with pop traffic - our compliance team works hard to both find and close fraud cases, whether that's closing accounts or clearing of wrong doing. We do try to work with affiliates on a case by case basis to resolve concerns and close matters swiftly.
I am always happy to be contacted directly if anyone has issues that come up, I make myself available quite publicly for that reason and we try to be as transparant as possible with these sorts of issues @ ClickDealer.
Thanks all!
Originally Posted by HenryW
You can only say quality is good when advertiser follows up and gets sales. So still I think this is a 100% mistake of Clickdealer (unless advertisers told its good without checking properly, but then CD should chase the money.)
Since CD didnt get paid, its quite obvious the AM made a mistake, otherwise you would chase the money I guess?
This all apart from the fact if you pay fully or only half ofcourse. These times ask for some more goodwill towards the people you work together ofcourse, all three parties... should chime in a bit maybe...
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