Program Owners - Blocking Fradulent Epoch Affiliates
 

Ok, so how do you Epoch program owners block a fraudulent affilliate from cascading a sale to another biller(NOT using NATS)?

We just got another bad affiliate from Epoch. Epoch blocked the affiliate but the sales are still cascading through to CCBill. CCbill can not block by epoch affiliate numbers, so the sales go through.

I don't understand why Epoch would still send the hits of a bad affiliate to our sites instead of redirecting them away.

What do you program owners do you stop this cascading mess?

Jimmy

The moment Epoch alerts us to a bad affiliate I deactivate that affiliate account so their traffic doesn't even reach our sites.

Epoch does a stellar job in identifying and blocking scammers, and letting the merchant know about it so we can take action on our end. They're the only processor that does this that we've worked with, and this helps tremendously in protecting our own merchant account.

They just blocked a buddy of mines account. Their response was 'no comment' when asked why. All of his traffic is 100% legit and legal. Apparently he is now under investigation and they're threatening to not pay him for any of his sales.

Kind of fucked up if you ask me.

Right, thanks. I was looking for a solution on how to do it.

Jimmy

You need a script that filters by refid. If the refid is in your blacklist, dump the hit, in our case we send to a page that says "sorry, but the link you came from is banned from sending traffic to our sites".


Their security department will very rarely give any sort of information out, for good reason. Once they blocked one of my affiliates that had never generated a -ve, and I know this guy to be solid, honest affiliate from before I started Bondage Bank (but with low sales, and that's a problem when you look at ratios). So yes, they are not perfect. But you can't be in this business. You write rules and conditions to stay one step ahead of the scum bags, sometimes you don't get it right, but it's far, far better to err on the side of caution considering the consequences of running afoul of the card associations. BTW, in the case of this affiliate I simply don't cascade him to Epoch.

I think the only time I've had a "bad affiliate" referred by a biller - I think it was Epoch - he was good. His URL was very prominent and just attracted carders so you had to be on top of that. He sent a lot of sales and they were 95% good. I've referred more actual carders to the billers.

You're kidding right? try and keep up a 5% -ve transaction volume on your merchant or processor account and see how quickly you get shut down. OK, so this is a single affiliate sending you 5% credits and chargebacks, so if your volume is high enough to absorb them it may be worth keeping the dodgy traffic. Still that's way, way high.