DigiResults - Scammy Affiliates?

I had something similar happen to me last year. It was frustrating as I thought I was doing really well and then I had the rug pulled from under me.

The way I get around it is to set delayed payments for my affiliates. I state that in my 'About your Affiliate Program' section so everyone knows before they join my affiliate program, they won't get paid for 30 or 60 days, like Clickbank.

Any true affiliate marketer will not be bothered about the delay. They have probably used Clickbank so understand the system.

Digiresults themselves say (in their help and support section):

We recommend using a 30-day delay as your default for new affiliates, though even a delay of 7-days is enough to protect you from most fraud. You should only use instant payments for trusted affiliates that you have an established relationship with.

I do love Digiresults though. It's so simple to set up. And I prefer the way it deals with sales funnels to JVZoo.

This has not happened to me but I have some friends who have been hit like this. Only offer instant payout to people you know and take the time to check the affiliate out. South east Asia has the biggest refund / scam rate so it might be a good idea to make a note of their location to.

Had this happen with JVZoo, so it's not the affiliate platform ... it can happen on any Instant Commission platform. I was able to quickly identify and get rid of the criminal affiliates and keep enough cash in my Paypal account to cover the disaster, so my account is still fine, gratefully.

Don't accept affiliates on an Instant Commission basis that you don't know and trust. Never. I email affiliates first and ask them how they intend to promote. Some answer back ... most don't. The ones that don't are denied. I don't automatically approve the ones who do answer back. Put them on Delayed Payments if you just want to try them out.

With Warrior Plus, the affiliate request links to the Warrior Forum profile for that affiliate, so you have an additional way to investigate the affiliate. Look at their profile and read their posts and see how long they've been a WF member and decide whether or not you feel they're trustworthy.

Whatever you do ... just don't approve people you don't know for Instant Commissions. It's a disaster.

The sad fact of the matter is that there are a lot of scammy affiliates out there. I have actually had hosting accounts cancelled because of affiliates spamming.

If you are going to use affiliates, you need to make sure you have 100% trust in them. And I would never allow a new affiliate marketer to market my products.

have a look at the affiliate history, if they don't and you don't know who they are, either set them to 30 days or deny them.

The other red flag will be when the conversion rate is stupidly high, that means the "buyers" have been using stolen cards, so start refunding asap - much cheaper and better for you than chargebacks.

This EXACTLY happened with me and my partner.

Paypal do not allow adaptive payment thing for my country so i did JV with my partner who were using Digiresults.

Same way one affiliate made us around $3000+ of sales, and after 1 month, all sales were charged back, paypal decided in the favor of buyers (which i assume is one person using multiple credit cards), this way guy got all the money back + affiliate commission and me and my partner have to pay i guess $10 chargeback fee on EACH CHARGEBACK + complete balance become negative.

Our Mistake: To approve affiliate whom we doesn't know about. Guys, this is very serious thing going on this instant commission model of paypal, make 1000% sure that you only approve affiliate whom you actually know personally, not just by there 'promise' of getting you lots of sales.

This is probably the easiest way to scam for $1000's using the 'loophole' of instant payments.

Hey warriors,

My apologies for such a delayed response.

Thanks so much for everyone's input and advice. It's sad how people out there can do this.. It's gone up to $2k now which I have to recover out of my own pocket cause of a stupid affiliate who scammed the hell outta me..

I guess there's always a lesson in everything.

Thanks again for the comments :-)

Sounds to me like these affiliate recruiting sites/platforms need to do more to protect the vendors from this type of stuff.

Maybe make it harder to become an affiliate or something because this type of crap should not be happening. These loop holes have to be covered and closed up by someone. Someone needs to come up with an idea to prevent this.

Yes, I know, no auto-approve and no instant commissions. That makes sense, but there has got to be other things that can be done.

Not sure what, just kinda throwing it out there.

Honestly, there should be some kind of legal action that could be taken against the affiliate who did this or the ones who do this crap.

I feel for any of you that this has happened to, I'm sure you'll recover from it, but wow, what a sucky thing to happen to someone.

I would expect Warrior Plus has less instances of this happening because:

a) they charge affiliates a monthly fee...

b) affiliates need to pay that monthly fee using a Paypal account so a footprint is left...

c) we are able to see their Warrior Forum profile before approving -- it' helps a lot.

The easier the platforms make it to become an affiliate the more likely it is they will do this type of thing. I'm not sure what a 7 day delay achieves though. Can't they just do chargebacks after the 7 days? Isn't it just pro-longing the inevitable?

But as Mike said, if people choose to keep approving affiliates they don't know then this will keep on happening. Vendors are the ones who lose out from this so they are the ones that need to take responsibility for their own actions.

It's sad that some unscrupulous affiliates had to resort to some scamming activities just so they can earn money online.

BIG MIKE, thanks for the detailed explanation. What affiliate network would that be for, Warrior Plus?

Don't approve affiliates you don't know. It's that simple. Those with free email addresses are always suspect.

Its not an issue with Digiresults, but and issue with platforms using the PayPal API which include Digiresults, W+ and JVZoo.

Delaying payments doesn't always helps as the scammers do the purchases anyway and they still get chargedback - just the scammers don't get paid, but your PayPal account still gets hits with chargebacks.

I've never had any issues as we don't approve affiliates we don't know and do due diligence on all affiliates.