The New Moron of the Week award goes to….

Moron of the Week: ‘Hey - I’ve got a smart idea!’
Overseas Dillhole: ‘Sir yes Sir what is it Sir?’
Moron of the Week: ‘Here is a list of Open Proxies, get your team to fill it the information on these forms and I will pay you 10 cents an hour for doing so.’
Overseas Dillhole: ‘Oh Sir yes Sir, this would be wonderful for all of the hardworking people of my glorious country. I will fill in all of these forms with the highest quality random information that we find at whitepages.com. Oh thank you Sir, 10 cents an hour is a wonderfully fair price, I look forward to long and prosperous dealings with your esteemed self.’
Moron of the Week: ‘i fooking rule! I’m gonna be rich! I am so smart! S-M-R-T!’

It is popular and simple. An oldie but a goodie that seems to of gained new traction lately.

So first off, Little Miss MOTW, ask yourself this? Do you Reeeeally think you are the first one to try this? Do you Reeeeally think that you are crafty enough to get it by the likes of Dan, Mill and myself? Do you Reeeeally think we don’t have a dozen filters in place to catch such tactics?

A few reasons why this will never work.

1. We maintain close relationships with all of our advertisers, we track all sales and conversions down to the affiliate level. Not just whether it converted on the front end to give our affiliate credit, but also to know whether the traffic that particular affiliate sent is ‘backing out’ or converting to a paid user for the advertiser. A lot of money is changing hands here and you can bet your left nut that ALL of the nickels and dimes are being counted. If you send us traffic that doesn’t back out, we’ll see that fairly quickly and, if you are lucky, pull you off the offer. More likely we’ll smell fraud, can your ass and/or chop you up and feed you to the pigs.

2. Using proxies. We are out their on the bleeding edge too. We actively maintain a list of open proxies, we work with organizations who do NOTHING BUT actively manage blacklists of IPs. Doesn’t matter where you bought that ‘top secret’ proxy list, we will figure it out soon enough and we WILL kick you in the nuts. If you are using the proxies at your school or anonymous surfing proxies that you find listed somewhere… pshaw… get a life n00b.

3. ‘I’m gonna run under the radar and only make $101 a month, but have 10 accounts at six networks! I’m so smart!’ Networks share info. If we find a crook we pass that info on and vice-versa. A central database is maintained by a third party which has a list of all of the affiliates ever canned by most of the major (and minor) networks. Pull a stupid stunt like this and you may find yourself wondering… ‘why do my applications to all of the CPA networks always get refused!?!‘ Make a hundred or a million, we’ll catch you, we’ll find you, we’ll introduce you to our ‘friend’ whom you’ll quickly wish you were to so acquainted with.

4. The offers you run. There are certain offers that are more susceptible to this type of scam than others. Essentially any offer that doesn’t require and paid sign up or credit card. Crooks especially love payday loan type offers that may have a high payout but still be free. Needless to say, these types of offers are gone over with a much much finer toothed comb.

5. Paypal or other anonymousish payment sources. Ask to get paid into anything other than a bank account with your name on it and PING you are at the top of our list of people in need of the latex glove treatment, sans lube. For the last time, NO we will NOT send a suitcase full of unmarked cash to a hotel in Bangladesh.

Long story short.. Really? Seriously? Is that is the best you can do? I’m pretty sure the bottle sorting depot downtown is hiring. Maybe you’d be better suited to that sort of job.

Here at Millnic we see all sorts of fascinately stupid and unseemly types wander through. Ocassionally (OK… regularily) one comes along and strikes us as worth a mention. We’ll share some them with you here… Names will be withheld to protect the ignorant.

#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*

Now I assume you are all familiar with the raging controversies around using the word FREE next to an offer and then having it not be free at all. Ringtones are the most famous of the bunch. Get 10 FREE Ringtones here! - NOT!! what you do get is 10 ‘FREE’ ringtones credits for signing up with this $9.99 a month ringtone club which you agree to have charged to your cellphone bill by ticking that little ‘agree to terms’ box which they have convieniently preclicked for you. Anywho i digress…

Not surprisingly, Ringtone companies are now the target of investigations by various consumer watch dog groups as well as the Florida Attorney General. Offers like this are always clearly marked with terms such as:

The words FREE, NO CHARGE, NO COST, etc., cannot appear in the title or text copy for any paid search listings.
This includes Google, Yahoo, MSN, and any other search engines.
The only approved synonym for “free” that can be used is COMPLIMENTARY and BONUS.

But do people listen? Well.. ya actually they usually do. Mostly because those terms are followed by:

Failure to comply with these terms will result in the cancellation of your account and no payment of monies owed.

Not worth the risk right? Well apparantly some people don’t read. And the 1st official Moron of the week sent out this messages in the hopes of drumming up some leads.

i usually hate spam but my friend sent me this free
ringtone site and it actually works. you get 10 FREE Ringtones and the ringtones are sick! check it out:
http://www.RingerBarn.com
I got new Beyonce, Akon, Sharkia, Linkin Park and Avril Lavigne RingTones FREE!! lemme know if u like it

Free appears three times, in all caps twice no less. I mean, jeez, there is walking the line, then there is trampling all over it…

So long story Short - This greedy, self centered, illiterate moron went and ruined the fun for us all. The ringtone campaign he hit was making EPC’s well over $1.25 and had dozens of publishers happily making enough profit on their PPC campaigns to buy a new pair of shoes for the orphans down the street. BUT - this morons message naturally caused the advertiser to FLIP! We had only been running this new campaign for a week or so and the advertiser, who assumes all the consumer watchdog risk, pulled the campiagn from our network and withheld payment… FUCK! Now we not only lost one of the best offers in our network, but we have to eat 30k in leads that we’ll never get paid for. Plus there will be no new shoes for those poor little orphans down the street.