PPV and DirectCPV Referrer weirdness (fraud?)

Hello everyone,

I would appreciate some opinions on running campaigns with DirectCPV

I am running a campaigns there.

It's a campaign that offers people a free New Car quote.

I am rotating 2 landing pages. Both CPA size optimized 750px x 550px.

One is a well designed one with a pretty pic and some bullet point and a huge Call to action.

One is just a red header, some black text and a small call to action link (Eben Pagan Design)




So I am bidding on 600 Domains all related to one car maker.

Traffic comes in moderately fast.

And for the first time in my life, I actually got clicks from my landing page to the CPA offer page.

Great!! I think. People are interested. Hoping a conversion will follow.




Days pass ...



The click trough rate on the landing pages is at 11%. Both are roughly the same. Always around 10%. Even tho they are very different



More and more clicks come in, no conversions.

I got around 2000 Views, ca 200 Clicks.




So I try something else and put statcounter code on my LPs.

The statcounter code shows the referrers, where the views come from.

And in these referrers, there are weird things to see.




Around 40% of my views come from pages like

guitarresources(dot)net/artist_D/disturbed_guitar_tabs/violence_fetish_guitar_tabs.html

The above mentioned site send me a visitor for bidding on "peoriatoyota(dot)com".




Than another the Domain I am bidding on "wildetoyota(dot)com" triggers a view from
twin-music(dot)com/artist_A/Aaliyah_lyrics/If_Your_Girl_Only_Knew_The_New_Remix_lyrics

These are completely unrelated Domains. Around 40% of my views have been triggered by these 2 dodgy Domains.




So I did a whois query on the 2 Domains
*guitarresources(dot)com and twin-music(dot)com.

These sites triggered the majority of my views that DirectCPV charges for. Both domains belong to the same owner "Paul Laurel". That does not necessary mean anything, I know.




So I wrote to Direct CPV support. They answered this:

This is happening because the source of the traffic are masking the original as some of our publishers do not want to reveal the sites to third party trackers. If you see the reports on your direct CPV campaign statistics, you can see the targets you are paying for.You can see what you are being charged for through the conversion report and the why pop.



They are saying this is normal and the publisher masks the source. Hmmmm... Why do they hide it with weird twin-music domain names?



Anyway, long text, short questions. Are there people with similar experiences? Does anyone know more?Is that a blatant scam? There are quite a few sugarcoated reviews on Direct CPA out there.

Thanks for any input in advance and much success to everyone.

Volker