Fraud, Fraud, Fraud and PPC, Please Help

Screening PPC?

Are you referring to screening the actual leads quality?

Most CPA marketers will not show where there traffic is coming from. There has been 1 to many times, that networks have taken a marketers campaign and began running it themselves. This also happens with hot cpa products, they get ripped too and put on by their own network owner.

So in terms of screening PPC? Its simple don't pay out if your not getting conversion or legit info on the back end.

Hello honestbizpro,

Lol, no i did not mean screening you the way it sounded. I meant by screening, shouldn't we be able to have a phone call? I have no problems communicating thru AIM or by emails but when i give a call and get an answering machine every time, usually a robotic one at that. And i'll get a call back but they always want to be the ones to call, not me call them. Red Flag right there. As far as the dark side, yea there will always be someone looking to beat the system.
Its not about your expertise, of course the more experienced usually the more money every one makes And we can never know ones marketing ethics until we start working with them. It has just become frustrating, i just want to work with real people. Look not every offer will work for everyone and we can't control what the end user puts as their info and we move on, communication is always the best to what we can do together to make a profit on both sides.

Yes unfortunately there is a lot of fraud in the affiliate and CPA industry which is why many networks screen their affiliates before letting them in. My friend actually owns a small CPA network and he sees at least 20 fraud signups per day, I can't imagine how many the bigger networks see. Anyways, here is what he does:

1) He immediately denies everybody from outside the US, Canada, or UK, they are given the option to "appeal" the decision but have to go through more additional screening which includes submitting proof of past payment from other affiliate programs and providing a scanned copy of their passport or photo identification. Declining the application almost immediately deters the scammers since they'd rather go and signup for other networks but the appeal is easy enough to allow legitimate affiliates from other countries in without too much of a hassle. Of course people who appeal will also have to go through the standard screening, which is part 2:

2) Everybody that is from the US, CA, or UK has their information (name, address, city, state, zip, phone) verified through public data. If the data can't be verified then it's an immediate red flag. He then calls them up and asks them questions only a true PPC advertiser would know (what type of landing pages do you use, what's your current best quality score, what tracking platform do you use, what's your average conversion rate, what other networks do you work with etc). If they don't answer the phone the first time then they do 2 more attempts, after that they are automatically declined and have to go through the additional screning in step 1. It's really important to ask them questions only a PPC advertiser would know because many of these fraudsters have gone as far as hiring people from craigslist to verify the phone call, collect the checks, and then send them off to the scammers.

3) Everything else is verified such as the website, that it's active, the whois information etc.

Everyone complaining about how hard it is to get into networks can thank the assholes who have forced us to make it difficult. We have a pretty good screening process and yet we still get stung once in awhile by fraudsters. It is getting to the point where a face to face meeting and a ton of identification is going to be necessary in the future. (I'm not kidding either...)

You shouldn't have to screen PPC traffic. FYI: some affiliates will tell you that they are marketing via PPC when they really aren't.