[cd34]

yeah, until he got tagged for fraud.

Back in the mid to late 90s, it was like the wild west. $2.95 joins paid $35. Payouts were made quickly, fraud control was new and if you did it late enough in the pay period, it couldn't get reviewed quickly enough and the check was cut. I know a lot of companies that paid their bills by scamming sponsors like that.

Nowdays, you'd get caught in a heartbeat -- probably even the day you made the charges. Ask Jim about his amazon fiasco or search the board -- and that's a mainstream sponsor with tens of thousands of affiliates.

Almost as good as the other scam where the webmaster would pay any surfer that signed up some fee for verification that they signed up using their code.

Revshare was the quick answer to this for smaller programs. PPS programs scrub transactions and eyeball anything for trends.

Like Jim said, if you're going to do that, let the sponsor know first -- lest ye be terminated very quickly. PPS sponsors today have very itchy trigger fingers -- and usually very few have any method of rebuttal short of Jim's Helpdesk.