[ATTN: WSO SELLERS] Affiliate Fraud Explained - And 7 simple tricks to get your money back NOW

Nothing worse to start your day off grumpy than to wake up with 5 of those emails staring at you

Surprised no one has figured this out over all these years. I searched the threads and I could not find anyone sharing how to get your money back after they do this.

Well, me never being the person to just let things go, I HAD to figure out what was happening. Took me awhile to figure out because these scammers are pretty slick.

The first few times I got the dispute it was my first wso every so I just logged into paypal, sent their money back and went on about my day.

Easy enough.

Then they just kept coming... and they will.. unless you stop them.

So here is exactly what they do (Don't ask me HOW they do it because I have no idea. I'm not a scammer. Just know they are doing this every single day):

1.They will sign up as your affiliate. You check out the profile and they have decent stats so it looks fine and you approve them.

2. They purchase your product from another account through their own affiliate link giving themselves the commission. Usually when you are offering 100% but they will do it to anyone that will approve them

3. They file a paypal dispute claim. Now this is the part I couldn't figure out. Why would so many customers file a claim instead of just requesting a simple refund like most do. Then when I would email them I realized... NONE of these dispute people were ever responding. :confused:

hmmmm curious.

So I tried to refund them inside of warrior plus ..... and THAT is when I figured it out

When they file a dispute it puts a hold on the entire transaction. So warrior plus is locked out of that transaction.

What this means?

You refund through paypal out of your money - Affiliate keeps the commission. So you basically just paid THEM the price of your product.

Typically, when you refund someone inside of warriorplus, it will automatically take the funds back from wherever they went. So if it was an affiliate purchase, then it will take back the commission to refund the buyer. But if the dispute blocks it, they keep it and it is money out of your pocket that you never got in the first place.

BUT THERE IS GOOD NEWS!!!

I had about 28 of these over the past 3 months and I successfully got every single one of them back!

Here is how to do it:

1. When you get the dispute log into your paypal, view the dispute and get the original buyer email and transaction ID

2. Cross check that inside your warriorplus (or any affiliate network) to see if an affiliate got paid for that purchase by searching by buyer email or transaction ID

3. 99% of the time you will see there WAS an affiliate paid



4. Go back to paypal and click "find a transaction"

5. Search that specific date only and scroll for that amount that the dispute was.

6. Right above it you will see the transaction with a minus (-) sign going out showing the money you sent to the affiliate.

7. THE BEST STEP OF ALL:

YOU FILE A DISPUTE AGAINST THEIR COMMISSION!!!

That's right. The EXACT same thing they did to you to cheat you, you can do right back to get your money back.

8. Wait a few days and escalate to a claim. If they dont respond in the amount of time, paypal will return your ill gotten commission.

I actually called paypal ahead of time and explained the whole thing and already knew the scam so it wasn't anything new. But he did say he put a "review" status on my account so they knew that I would be filing a bunch of disputes against all the past ones I had already resolved.

But over the next few weeks following, paypal gave me back every last one!

Here is what you do next:

1. obviously ban that affiliate or check "auto-deny" for future promotion because it will be tough trying to keep up with all of them

2. Go to that warrior's profile and post something on the visitor wall to let other product owners know ahead of time

It seems before approving an affiliate most will go to the visitor wall and check out the profile before approving.

No we will not stop all of them because they just keep creating new accounts and doing it all over again.. but at least we can slow them down.

A few things to look out for before approving an affiliate

1. ALWAYS check their profile first.

If they just joined yesterday - deny

Zero posts - Deny

Other warriors have mentioned something on the wall - Deny

2. Check their stats

One of the DEAD giveways that I noticed across ALL of the fraud accounts I found:

THEY HAD A 0% refund rate! Yeah... what should normally be an awesome stat... actually can be a sign of fraud. I mean, no one, product owners or affiliates can never have 100's of sales and not a single refund. I mean, I guess it is possible. But I have found that most of my best affiliates all have something showing in the refund rate. It happens. So what.

So if you see 500-1000 sales and 0% refund rate - DENY! RARE! Trust me. I have purchased WSO's that were brilliant that I would have gladly paid 100 times as much for it and STILL would have felt I got my money's worth and seen them totally ripped apart on the thread with refund requests. Even the best of the best gets refunds.

READ: They have 0% refund rate because they file the dispute so you can NEVER refund their commission

Another sure sign: They have almost a 100% conversion rate. If they have 7 clicks and 7 sales... It would be a safe bet to say you are going to get about 5-7 paypal disputes of the next few weeks. But you will only see this stat AFTER you got the dispute. I wouldn't go denying people while the sales are coming in lol

Just be smart about who you approve. It was my first wso and no one told me about this so I was just happy to see someone wanted to promote my product since I was a newcomer here so I foolishly was approving everyone.

So I wanted to share this to hopefully help out others who may still not understand what is happening, how to get your money back or someone who may be thinking about launching their first product and approves everyone hoping to get noticed.


(I was going to add a bunch of screen shots walking through this process but I figured most product owners know how to navigate paypal and warriorplus. If I am wrong let me know and I will add more or make a video walking through this process