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Rick's Rants: Scammers, Cheaters and Criminals (August 2004)
by Rick Latona, Dollars.com and CJBucks.com
One needs a high standard of ethics to succeed in the adult Internet industry, but you can check your morals at the door when you come in.
Morals have no place in our industry. Morals won't help my site visitors whack off, laugh and watch things die on a site like Consumption Junction, so why bother with them? However, if I think you are a scammer, cheater or a criminal you won't be getting my business. Recently, I've become fed up with scumware promoters, so I decided to write my rant this month on this issue to raise awareness in the adult community.
Adware done right is a great business model. Why try to get people to come to your free site, when you can pop triggered ads throughout the day directly at the PC level, regardless of which site someone is searching. This article is NOT about adware, it's about scumware. Be aware, the ability to auto-update an .exe on your surfer's computer is too much power for some people to handle.
There are many legitimate actions you can program adware to take on a PC, but I will now list some actions that are absolutely not legitimate from my point of view. Pay attention, because if you have any traffic at all, you are losing some of it as a result of the following actions.
Affiliate Code Redirection
This is the process of stealing sales from webmasters. The thief need only create a database of affiliate codes after signing up to every program they can find which offers a commission. When the end user clicks on a link, the affiliate code is replaced with the thief's code and they get the money that you should have earned.
Join Page Redirection
This one is a bit more complex than the simple affiliate code redirection. For this, they need to use their own processing account or run the transactions through an IPSP (Internet Processing Service Provider). When the end user clicks on join they actually buy a membership to a completely different site! Image your users thinking they are going to join yoursite.com and then actually joining a completely different site!
E-mail Theft
Some thieves have programs that will scan the PC for every e-mail address on the hard drive, and steal the contact information of everyone you've sent an e-mail to - and that has sent one to you! Clearly these are not permission-based campaigns they will be sending out. So, to get the mail delivered they use proxy servers.
Proxy Mailing
Why bother trying to get 20 million e-mails delivered from one server when you can have 10 million PCs sending only two e-mails each. That's the concept of proxy mailing. Some scumware owners are installing proxies, and hitting ISPs from so many different directions they have a near 100% delivery rate! I wonder what their end users would think if they knew their computers were in fact spam servers.
Banner Replacements
I consider the replacing of ads on a website thievery. Naturally I have a biased opinion, since I'm serving over 10 billion ads myself every month. It is one thing to launch a triggered console based on user preferences, but it's another thing to outright steal the traffic from a website by replacing the actual paid ads that are in the page. Some of these scammers are recognizing image source tags and URLs, and simply replacing the banners in the Web page with one of their own.
Browser Exploits
This is the process of installing scumware on someone's computer without their permission. The scammers either code themselves, or buy on the open market, what's called a "browser exploit." These are codes that will trigger a browser to install the scumware without popping a yes/no box to ask the user if they want it installed. This concept is often called a drive-by install as well.
So what is right and what is wrong? That's the tricky part. I have listed the items I consider "wrong." The problem is that some of the items I've listed are not yet illegal. The U.S. congress is starting to wake up to the problem, but it will take time to fix. One thing is fairly certain. They will never outlaw permission-based installs. They may outlaw certain actions that those installs are performing, such as e-mail theft and the like, but companies with a large install base will still have a valuable product if they can prove that the user accepted the install. Don't look at it any differently than companies that spent years building a double opt-in e-mail list. Those companies are still making a great deal of money from their list if they did it right.
We all draw our own ethical and moral lines in this business, and face decisions daily on whether or not we should cross those lines. I try to live by the rule that if it seems wrong, it probably is wrong. I don't worry about morals so much, but I try to have a super-high standard of ethics. The motto is Do No Harm.
I have no problem with legitimate, permission-based adware installs that pop ads a few times a day and never pop ads that are adult unless the end user is on an adult site. However, I wanted to write this article because I'm very upset with the activities and actions of some companies right now. I very much want to raise the awareness of what is currently out there. We all need to keep an eye out for these companies, and do what we can to stop them!
Rick Latona's company started with Consumption Junction and has turned into a powerhouse delivering tens of billions of banner ads and text links monthly through a network of free adult sites. Each of his sites has strong consumer brands that generate bookmarkers and a loyal fan base. Recently we've seen him launch Dollars.com which as a B2B advertising exchange only puts him in charge of even more traffic. Visit www.kblogger.com for more of Rick's tips.
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