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Merchants take Measures Against Affiliate Fraud

Although the affiliate market is an asset to merchant business, affiliate fraud can ruin the relationship between merchant and affiliate. Twibo, one of the newest affiliate programs, has publicized the measures it will take against the abusers within the affiliate market. The new goal for merchants - make sure affiliates are clean and keep rogue affiliates away from business.

One suspect practice of some affiliates is typosquatting - trading off common misspellings of existing companies. Dorian Harris, Director of Sales and Marketing for Skoosh ,which this month launched its own affiliate program, Twibo, is only too well aware of the issue. When he originally started trading as Twinroom in 2001 he set up as an affiliate of one of the leading hotel booking companies. Finding that even his loyal customers were wrongly referring to the site as `Twinrooms`, he looked into buying the domain, only to find that it was already taken. Disappointment turned to frustration when it emerged that the unscrupulous registrant of Twinrooms was poaching his loyal customers, acting as an affiliate of the very same merchant.

`It was unbelievable to me that a merchant would allow a new affiliate to trade off the name of an existing one but our appeals were flatly rejected despite the immense commissions we had accrued for the company,` Harris comments. Unable to reverse the merchant`s decision, and faced with a huge bill if he chose to contest the typosquatting case in a legal battle, he took the ultimate step and set up a separate company, Skoosh, as a merchant in the same industry, hotel accommodation. With its own newly-launched affiliate program, Twibo, Skoosh has learned from this experience and is taking measures to prevent affiliate fraud from occurring within its new recruits.

`For a start we screen every new affiliate,` Harris explains, `and we run through a checklist on the data affiliates used to sign up to the program. Often the last check before acceptance as a Twibo affiliate is a personal phone call. Sometimes it`s the only way to know for sure if someone is legitimate.` Afterwards, each affiliate is continually monitored, their sites visited and their newsletters reviewed. In the background, the tech department checks incoming IP patterns for any suspicious activity coming from affiliate links.