With obvious reason the system could block fraudulent transactions but terminating account without any proper reason is not good, Yahoo should check their system and thoroughly investigate before terminating any such account.

Poor Jeremy, I think Yahoo should apologize, open his account and give him a job at Yahoo HQ.

Hmm… Google always have been doing this kind of a thing with their adsense publishers.

This is a stupid move from YSM, this is the guy who made 130k $ in one month from Google adsense.
The guy know his shit.

To the people asking, you can’t do anything to validate fraudulent credit cards. The credit card company will approve the transaction and all will be OK until the original card holder gets their bill a month later. They’ll complain to their credit card company who will then do a charge back, debiting Yahoo for the original amount plus a $30 fee.

So Yahoo ends up owing Jeremy the original affiliate fee as well as owing the CC company $30. As 65% charge back rate would mean that they are better off without him. You would have to think that with that number of unsavoury characters signing up through his account something is amiss; I’m not sure how Jeremy is promoting Yahoo on his website however.

Yahoo’s could remove the $30 charge back fee from Jeremy’s account; this is what Paypal does. However, that would probably leave Jeremy with no income at all. They definately should have a better idea of what is happening within their system. They should be able to type IP addresses to certain transactions, so including a referrer wouldn’t be much of a step up.

I’ve had a similar experience with another advertising company. It baffles me how some companies wont check the geo-location of an ip address against the credit card account. If its in another state/country you flag it as possible fraud and hold the funds for 30-60 days or review the order by hand.

I guess the problem is CJ (Commission Junction). From the original email:

Jeremy,

We can give you the referring URLs for all of your traffic, but I don’t believe CJ ties or logs a specific referring URL to each transaction in their reporting. Therefore we can’t tie discrete clicks to the fraudulent sign ups. We’d love to keep you in the program if we can find a way to address this issue.

Michelle

Obviously they have referring URLs for all Jeremy’s traffic, but seems because of CJ (Commission Junction), the affiliate site they are using, they don’t have data to track the clicks to their original sign ups.

In a seperate email, they say they are going to terminate partnership with CJ within 7 days, so I guess CJ is giving a lot problems here.

Hi Jeremy,

We performed another quality audit of your YSM sign ups and we are still receiving the same results. 65% of your YSM sign ups are fraudulent which is 10x more than the average affiliate in our program (coming through PID xxxxxx and xxxxxxxx). Unfortunately, we are going to have to end the relationship. Our partnership through CJ will expire in 7 days. Keep in mind that we do not believe you are intentionally generating the fraudulent sign ups. However, we can’t continue with this partnership as we are losing money.

Give me a call if you’d like to discuss further: xxx-xxx-xxxx

Thanks,
Michelle

Josh: I agree validating fraudulent credit cards is difficult. Similarly thing happened to me with Paypal. I received several fraudulent charge backs involving big amount of money after the items were delivered to the buyers. I filed claims through paypal “buyer protection policy”, but they only covered the first $5000, and then discontinued my paypal account saying they are losing money on my account.

Seems they are all good as long as you are a good customer and bring them money, but if not, you are kicked out.

shoemoney?

Bad Bad reputation for YSM..Blocking fraudulent accounts was quite common sensical, wasn’t it?

Just plain bizarre!

similar thing happened to me in Adsense,
I got fraudulent clicks (20) and I reported to Google,
next day I get a mail from Adsense saying:
“we discovered fraudulent clicks in your account, so you are out of Adsense”

WTf*ck!
they didn’t discovered anything! I told them, and I told them the IP where the fraudulent clicks come from.

I was making +800USD/ month,
and someone, in 20 clicks (+ my correctness) ruined it all.

tips:
1) never put all your eggs in one basket
2) NEVER be a nice guy, it is not worth

*I know this comment is a bit off-topic but… I don’t care, I’m angry. sorry

@11

no good deed goes unpunished.

@12
yes in Google

…the worst of all is that I was using the same adsense account in 5 different domains, and the one that got invalid clicks was very new and was not making any money.
so, when they banned my account, affected all 5 domains.

…anyway….

It’s because the majority of people who read his blog are slimeballs trying to make a quick buck.

Unfortunate Jeremy, Never expected this from Yahoo; Google under this aspect is even worse.

Someone invented Cloaking black box device to trigger more Adsense revenue on PHP code. Google & Yahoo, microsoft, 3com, Novell, Cisco knew about it. It sorta like hacker’s black box. You plug in blackbox device and run the server.

You can’t no longer make money on PHP code. Venture capitalist such as sequoia, mayflower, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, all knew about shadow ad triggering.

I think people should drop php programming and switch to ruby, other internet language.

I love it when a big company does something stupid to a vocal user and it turns into a big story. Haha on Yahoo.

It does sound like it has a lot to do with CJ as well, though. Of course, it doesn’t really affect CJ directly, so they probably don’t care enough to try harder.

This is one reason why I own Google stock, not Yahoo. AK

If you use PHP…. You will lose IPO market shares.

Double edge sword affiliate marketing is.

Other member was right. Yahoo is better off without Jeremy. It also shows where his marketing to going to - large percentage of his audience are scumbags.

Starting blogging company can be dangerous even if you have a good job like IBM, Novell, Delta Airline, etc. Some companies do fire or layoff for website blogging. It true, many Bloggers got kicked out by Google Adsense & Yahoo Publish Network.

I have seen Airliner, Artist, Poet, Journalists, WGA Screenwriters, and Rosie O’Donnell and all got layoff or fired for blogging.

Yeah I agree on all the posts saying that Google has been doing this for ages to their Adsense account holders.. often giving them NO REASON WHATSOEVER on terminating their accounts and aften forfeiting the balance too.

But when Yahoo does this (and even tries to work it out with the affiliate too), everyone rains on them.

I guess the Google’s “Halo effect” works in their favor. Bah.

A little off topic, but you can’t explain what yahoo search marketing is as “think Google Adwords, but from Yahoo.” That’s unfair to Yahoo, as they were first in this game.

can someone explain to me while credit card companies charge the $30 bucks from stores when they end up a target of fraud?

I mean wtf, why should I lose money because some jackass scammed me with a fraudlent credit card #? Take back the cash? Sure thats bad for me since I probably sent the item already, but I understand that. But why should I suffer further and lose $30 more on the transaction?

@Andrew, The credit card companies provide a network through which one can process payments, not to police the customers you attract.

If you have issues with chargebacks, you are attracting the wrong customer base. You can take steps to better insure minimal chargebacks by collecting more data from your customers, reviewing each item individually, using a cell phone number to SMS an access code (thereby you have their cell phone number, or even use one of the very expensive “extra services” from the merchant services provider that you use called Fraud Prevention Service. Only accepting US credit cards is another way.

Yes, these will increase your transaction costs, but Visa, for example, is in no better position to police your customers just because they own a network to authorize and process payments around the world in all currencies.

Do you have any idea how many “hands” a transaction goes through? No less than 4 and up to 7.

@ 23 Scratchiti

GoTo (Overture) came up with the Paid Search model but Google came up with the syndicated contextual text ads model (i.e. AdWords). Yahoo copied them on that front.

Paul J, that’s correct . . . I was thinking in terms of Yahoo incorporating overture first and now owning it.

@25 As a store you can’t really choose which customers you attract. Its not like people go out of their way and say “Hey everyone if you use a stolen credit card we want you to buy from us!”

The charge back is a service for the customer, not the actual store. So why not charge the customer for it, surely they’ll be much more willing to pay a minimal fee to get the rest of their money back? And this would cut down on fraudelent chargebacks.

Why should the store suffer for something they have no control over? I mean I’m already getting screwed since I already sent the item when the charge back comes through, why should I lose even more money on this transaction?

And the whole, its the store’s responsibility…sure sounds great in theory, but the credit cards should be the ones increasing their security, not the mom and pop stores. How hard would it be for VISA to add passwords to their credit cards? Or even a PIN? They already have a 3 digit security code…but its pretty worthless since its printed on the credit card. Replace that with a hidden security code/PIN and bam you instantly eliminate the whole credit card getting stolen to buy shit.

What’s with the PHP bullshit (comment 16)? And a shadow clicker blackbox? WTF are you talking about? Some newfangled urban legend you read about or some total BS’ing friend was boasting to you about? Good gawd.

As for Jeremy, yes, many who frequent his blog are the quick buck artists and the scraper generator site owners. Jeremy himself pretty much did some of those things too. However, 65% is a crazy high figure.

I am guessing someone was targeting him or someone scraped some of his sites with the links and then those (non-Jeremy) sites were generating the crappy clicks. I have had many of my pages directly copied…affiliate links and all. It is just additional content fodder for these folks. They scramble it up and mix it with other sites just to generate semi-unique content per page.

Yahoo should be commended for trying (albeit without must techno-savvy) to clean up their distribution network, even at the expense of their own revenues.

I know lots of search/affiliate arbitrageurs (including folks who were running at even larger scale than Shoemoney), and let me tell you - the last thing they need is sympathy. They made HUGE money while the getting was good, and their gravy-train lasted longer than they would have ever dreamed.

All this fraud in search/contextual is ultimately due to the fact that

Sorry, but only because someone runs a huge blog doesn’t make him more trustworthy. Jeremy’s traffic are 99% SEOs, Affiliate marketers and BS artists. Certainly not any priests.
He attracts BS traffic so why protect him and treat him differentially.

YaWho? These guys are crazy. They blew this one in a bunch of ways, from not punishing the fradulant accounts only to not know shoe would put them on blast. PR I assume did not have a hand on this one.

Yahoo uses CJ and you can pull referring source for Shoemoney’s traffic. From there, you can track back the referral source to the Shoemoney blog.

That said, I agree that SM’s blog attracts quick buck guys that are probably churning at a fast rate when they realize they dont know how to do search.

Best is to keep SM in the program, but charge back the churn rate.

@22

Google routinely boots people out. It’s nothing new. They’re kind of a faceless anonymous jerk in that regard. Yahoo on the surface seems more friendly, so it’s probably a bit more of a shock to see them do it to someone, especially after a long drawn out conversation like the one detailed in the blog. The conversation gives the appearance that they want to help, even though they don’t actually do.

I think Josh (#5) is the only person who gets it right.

Yahoo’s done nothing wrong. He sends them crap traffic and they lose money on him - that’s the bottom line. I’d like to see how YOU - people supporting him would deal with someone who makes YOUR go down the drain by sending you loads of fraud. I guess you guys have no clue what it is like to have your own merchant account and what a mess chargebacks are.

It’s a business relationship and they’ve been polite enough with him (while he acted like a complete jerk). Go Yahoo!

… vbecause they are not a totally MS shop, yet.
fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

knowing schoemakers form i’m surprised tech crunch have bought this crock of cow manure

Wow. So many people want to think that Shoemaker has somehow been horribly wronged.

Chargebacks were costing Yahoo more money than they were making from him, so of course they terminated his account. If mr. shoemaker can’t keep logs on his own cash cow sites, sounds like he has a bit of a problem.

If shoemaker actually sold products or didn’t conduct his business by making false statements and broad claims I *might* feel a little more sympathetic.