HydraMason
Beverly Hills,#2UPDATE Employee
Wed, February 17, 2010
We did not pay this publisher/affiliate for the fraudulent online ads he placed, though we did pay him for some other legitimate advertising traffic.
He ran a well-known scam form of advertising to promote a credit report offer by placing a job posting on Craigslist and having the ad indicate that a credit report was required to apply for the job - most likely a job that didn't really exist - and then provided a handy link to the advertiser's web site. Because of this and other well-known scams, our company and nearly all others disallows any Craigslist advertising in our terms and conditions.
Though the complainant in this case swears he never ran ads on Craigslist, the advertiser provided recordings of calls of consumers who replied to ads placed by this publisher. The consumers say they
were answering a job posting on Craigslist. As this was in clear violation and a clear case of fraud, the advertiser asked to remove this publisher from campaign and invalidate all his leads.
Interestingly, this same publisher posted this same complaint on WickdFire, an online forum where affiliates/publishers congregate. Unfortunately for him, this community of his peers was well informed on what he tried to pull and turned against him.
Here are some quotes from that forum:
"dude, you're a frauding piece of (expletive).... and your tactics are years old. fail on SO many levels"
"Dont come knocking here either, we actively answer CL (Craigslist) posts to find you guys. Mason feel free to PM me his info so i can ban him from our network too."
and there are many more like that.
This affiliate did not "rightfully" promote the offer and is angry he got caught. In fact he threatened our company that he would make postings to damage our reputation, and this is one of those attempts.
Our online advertising network is constantly monitoring advertising performed by our affiliates to weed out exactly this type of fraud as it deceives consumers, harms our business, and casts all of Internet advertising in a negative light. This poster - like many others we have caught - did not like being caught and is trying to do what he can to get even.
If the poster, despite all this, insists on persisting with his baseless claims, I believe he should provide proof. My company is prepared to provide proof that it was indeed fraud.