Investigating the people behind those sketchy flat-stomach ads.

The Mercenary

When an affiliate advertises for a scam, he has two options. He can buy advertising that links straight to the scam vendor’s page (with his affiliate code embedded in the link so he gets a commission if there’s a purchase). But, as we’ve discussed, that method isn’t always best because those pages often get stripped from ad networks.

So instead, they create a landing page. The idea is to create an interstitial page that hypes up the product so that readers are likely to both click through to the product page and buy it once they’re there. The pages usually appear as first-person blogs that have a picture of the author with a short bio and a testimonial about how great the product is. See Jacky’s, Monica’s, and Ellie’s weight-loss blogs, all of which feature the same woman’s picture (illegally pulled from iStockphoto) and all of which link to different weight-loss products.

Creating one of these landing pages can take seconds. All you have to do is take somebody else’s landing page, copy the HTML, and make a few superficial changes to personalize the site. (As I’ve written about before, the stimulus scams seem to have an especially prevalent copy-cat culture.) There are even sample landing pages (.zip file) to download on the Internet for those who really want to poach. Of course, nobody can get that upset about landing page theft, since the scam-riddled portion of the industry is based off of deception in the first place. If a landing page isn’t a first-person testimonial, it can be a review site that touts the vendor’s (or multiple vendors’) product as the best, with a link to the page where it can be purchased. Often these sites will say they’re sifting the scams from the legitimate sites, when they’re doing exactly the opposite. How convenient.

The audience

By now, the trap has been set. To entice consumers into the landing pages, the affiliates buy up advertising in a variety of venues, namely search-engine, social-media, and third-party ad networks. The ad networks will take in the scammy ads because they can’t screen them all ahead of time, and—thanks to the landing pages—they appear to lead to legitimate sites. Google told TBM that it relies on users to report abuses, since it can’t screen all of the ads in its Adwords network. Other networks have the same problem—the scam-fronts are bidding high prices at the ad auctions, so it pays not to check into them too deeply. Facebook is especially egregious. The affiliates keep track of which ads and landing pages are performing the best (offering the most commissions) through free tools like Prosper202.