Subscribe RSS
Comment RSSLeadCola Hacked, Accused of Scrub and Bribing AffPaying
Written by Pace LattinAugust 23, 2012 # 2:50 pm # Industry News, Specials # 33 Comments
You have to have wondered what happened with LeadCola this week, when hundreds of publishers received emails sending them to the infamous “GoogleHammer” dick-rolling site, exclaiming that it was a great new offer. After their logins were posted publicly by perhaps a former disgruntled employee, several mass emails were sent out by their systems that included content from the pornographic to the plain silly.
It seems that LeadCola was not having a good week already, thanks to “Hack, the Son of Zeus” an infamous WickedFire moderator with what seems to be insane powers that allow him to out networks left and right.
According to .Hack, who was nice enough to email me information, not only is LeadCola engaged in epic scrubbing, as per his original post on Wickedfire but has been involved in less than ethical business practices. He claims that during a flight out to Canada to be a consultant for the company, he witnessed behavior that he called “shady shit” and has provided this screenshot to prove that they scrub 35% by default.
On top of all this unfortunate news for LeadCola, is an accusation that AffPaying, the affiliate review site, has been accepting bribes from LeadCola and other networks to hide bad reviews for networks. According to him, “AffPaying is definitely rigged. I’ve seen many fake reviews and networks that have had 2.2 stars with 27 negative reviews (Leadcola) go to 4.06 stars and 5 negative reviews.”
—–
Check out ITALeads.com
Play the Game, Make The Money
Written by Pace Lattin
Pace Lattin is one of the top experts in interactive advertising, affiliate marketing. Pace Lattin is known for his dedication to ethics in marketing, and focus on compliance and fraud in the industry, and has written numerous articles for publications from MediaPost, ClickZ, ADOTAS and his own blogs.
There are thirty-three comments. Join the discussion.
Share/Bookmark this!
I feel bad for the brother – nice enough guy and for every one step we “Indians” take forward in this industry, things like this take us two steps back.
Hope they get this sorted out and do right by everyone, but seems may be too late.
Ricky you are a man of your own. I understand what you mean by “us” but you are never included in anything like this crap.
Leadcola also employs Jared Petersen to start facebook forums and try to extort money from companies they have sent fraudulent data to. He owns the forums and is the admin and doesn’t allow the companies he is doing this to into the forum so they cannot stop the slander nor defend themselves. I have seen this done to FOUR companies besides my own.
Leadcola, in our relationship with them, has done more fraud on our offers than any other network. They are terminated and have changed their name yet month after month I continue receive their pixels through other affiliates or networks wanting to defraud more offers through our network. These people are the blight of the industry and not a thing they do has shocked me. I am glad to see them outed finally for their awful behavior. Hopefully they will disappear forever now!
Amy – tell me how you really feel.
WOW WOW WOW Amy what’s really on your mind……lol
Funny, because I’ve heard a lot of the same things said about Blue Phoenix…
WOW…INSANE!! I hope that some good will come from this for you and your company Amy.
What short term thinking… insane!
-Antonio Easter
Antonio Easter recently posted..What is CPA Marketing – FINALLY FREE…
Thanks for the article Pace. Networks that run like this need to be outed, even if the people are “very nice”. It’s usually the ones that act very nice and oblivious that fuck people over. They have to realize that sooner or later the makeup will wear off the pig and deal with the consequences.
@Ricky Don’t be so broad. You and many other “Indians” bring the industry to another level. Unfortunately things like this happen where one feels ashamed of our own “people” and it should give you more drive to prevail.
@Amy That is unfortunate and thanks for coming out on this.
To anyone who has been getting frauded by a company or person and have proof but wants to remain anonymous you can always PM me on Wickedfire or tweet me at @nthngcnbxplnd
Lol affiliates made they got scammed when all they do is scam others
The entire affiliate space is rife with scammers. You are who you play with boys
Not all affiliates are scammers. Their are a lot of REAL entrepreneurs who build REAL sustainable businesses in the affiliate marketing space.
I “play” with a FEW SELECTED PROVEN affiliate networks… networks that make it through MY qualifying process. To my knowledge, I have not been scammed by them. However, just because an affiliate is partnered with a less than honest network, doesn’t make that affiliate a sacammer.
Haha… what a well thought out conclusion Mr. Lol
-Antonio Easter
Antonio Easter recently posted..What is CPA Marketing – FINALLY FREE…
It should come as no surprise that a network running cake is scrubbing especially on email submits.. Which the offer owners themselves only pay for about 1/5 leads max.. That is the lowest form of affiliate marketing…
I don’t trust any network who runs on cake to pay accurate conversion counts.. So the only thing to do is constantly monitor eCPC and when you are not getting it go for a better place with traffic. A truly honest offer will earn years of attention taking low margin.. The ones who are ultra greedy attract all the scamming overseas people who spend their day posting records into low paying offers like email submits.
Your retarded. Cake is regarded as the highest quality tracking for a reason. Its my favorite tracking and converts the best for me.
Has Offers is worse. They Delete the leads that they reverse & you cant prove anything except that the offer originally credited on your end, so you think that it was pixel manipulation & then start looking into your publishers traffic, which causes even more problems. Also they use the “scrubkit” as another excuse to scrub leads. All these tools they have been using are only making things worse….
but there are plenty of honest & legitimate networks & publishers out there. You just always remember the bad ones.
While I would never ever say scrubbing is good behavior I feel as though the problem is more of the archaic nature of the email submit. So let me give an example/scenario of why. Some “email submits” pay out $2-$2.50 per submit. Let’s say your running a really rough campaign where the traffic quality is poor (hard incent for example.) The user will NO DOUBT submit just their email to the offer, but that’s all they will do. The advertiser ends up making no money on the backend and the once 50 cent epc turns to 3 cents. So am I supposed to believe that now 1% of the people who clicked my offer didn’t even put in their email when just the day before 25% of the people did? Where they are being incentivized to do so?? Well that’s just garbage. The real problem here is people should be paid a percentage of what their traffic is actually worth. Nowadays email submit companies usually don’t even USE the actual “lead”. They either just sell it off or disregard it completely. So while this is definitely not something email submit companies will admit to doing, people need to also understand how stupid the idea of an email submit even is. PS THEY ALL DO IT. Don’t even get me started on “zip submits”. LOLOLOL K
/end rant
This is such a dumb comment. So you think that just because its an email submit, that gives somebody the “right” to scrub? If they are paying $2/lead, and im sending legitimate traffic (ie; non incent), then I EXPECT TO BE PAID ON EVERY SINGLE LEAD I SEND YOU. It’s not my fault you don’t know how to monetize your leads properly, or are too lazy to do so.
Your argument is terrible. Should we start only paying traffic sources for the clicks that convert? “Oh sorry, we spent $1,000 but only made back $500. We’ll need that other $500 from you.”
LOL nice logic.
Well example if a mailer sends GI traffic its less likely to convert on the path than a cable/tld user who’s less marketed to. Some traffic just sucks and if we literally did pay for every single lead we’d all be bankrupt.
Pace,
Excellent article. However, you left out one small details in your headline, and that is their propensity to maliciously slander companies left and right on other forums, knowing full well certain company’s (like mine for instance) had nothing to do with ANY fraud or ANY payment issue. I personally went out of my way to help them collect and what I was told was fraudulent traffic from said ex consultatant, yet persisted in going out of their way to tie my company to the ex-consultant after repeated attempts from me to ask them to merely remove my companies prominent logo that my ex employee was wearing on a thsirt and then “attempted” to sue me PERSONALLY for a deal that they knew full well i had NOTHING to do with. Cant say I am surprised they are a bunch of shady deadbeats and dont pay their pubs after what they did to me. I run a technology company that has nothing to do with affiliate offers. Glad to see they are finally getting whats coming. They deserve every bit and more so. You can read my my tale of woe in the fb group the alliance. So thank you Pace on shining a light on these scumbags. I cant wait to read their death notice in your forum.
An affiliate Network scrubs? 35% thats not that much – I know some networks who have a 65% scrub on all offers. Some offers they claim as being scrubbed they actually are not scrubbed – just decide to increase margin.
One of the biggest reason i don’t run email submits , About leadcola not surprised at all why do we forget everyone in this industry is here just to make money , so they do by any means… No matter what it takes them , And there are many networks doing it … About Affpaying.com i know GAO since a year and call me Biased or what ever i will support GAO , You got real proof go contact him personally if you think your review was removed …
P.S NO one is paying me to write this comment or sponsoring my blog or what so ever …
KJ recently posted..What VPS Package you should choose for trackers
I would like to reiterate on something. Sunil and some affiliate managers were good people. I know Sunil will do way better on his own without Amar. Amar is the one that was making everyone push shady shit and to let run incent on every offer. Jared is just Amar’s retarded puppet.
If you can put this under the article as update I would appreciate it. Thanks
Not all networks scrub, and believe it or not, some networks will go out of their way to make sure every lead counts. The issue here is the Advertiser. A lot of times, networks run offers from direct advertisers, and the Advertisers are the ones scrubbing on their end. When an Advertiser scrubs, the networks pixel will also not fire, therefore the lead is pretty much lost without much proof, except just monitoring the EPC’s to make sure the conversions are within historical data norms. We’ve ran a lot of email submits with direct advertisers, and on very similar offers, you have EPC’s at around $.30 and then on a very similar offer with the same conversion point, the EPC’s are at $.03. That is usually the best indication. Also, most networks that use industry standard platforms, such as HasOffers, Linktrust, Cake, etc… cannot scrub. Unless they have some arrangement with the platform provider to build them a scrub script on the down-low. Usually the guys to watch out for are the ones that have their own proprietary platform. Anything goes with these guys, and they can customize their system anyway they like. Not saying all of them are bad, just do your due diligence before you commit your hard earned traffic.
You can scrub automatically on cake as far as I know
I know for sure that affpaying is working for affiliate networks.Few days back I have written a review on how a Network has cheated me.I even included the conversation with AIM and the screenshots.To my surprise i got a call from the AM about the post (which was still waiting for moderation) on affpaying ! How come there are zero negative reviews for EWA and Blam ads when all the forums are filled with complaints about non payments ??? Affpaying is SCAM !!
I am right there with the same experience. Affpaying does not show any negative reviews. Eagle and his amazing rental vehicles still can not afford to pay on time.
Forget the propaganda (this site included) create your own offers tailored to your traffic. Consider creating your own digital products if possible. CPA companies are all full of it. From now on, just assume that the network is screwing you wherever possible.
Concerning race, ethnicity, and national origin; Just leave that out of your (Ricky) analysis. Ive been all over S. Asia as a brown westerner. There are all types of people here, but more than not network security is a joke. Technical aptitude is the lowest I have seen anywhere. English textbooks are published with bad English. I’d hate to see what kind of mythology the CS instructors are pushing through their academic culture of regurgitation.
Nobody should be surprised that an Indian group lost it on security. Nobody should be surprised that a CPA company is scrubbing and scamming.
I prefer to remain with the big guys. I never believe any review. I personally ask a few friends and their experience with the network.
Which “big” guys are you alluding to? Copeac? Epic? Neverblue?
Being large is not a guarantee that you will get paid, sending quality traffic though will go a long way.
Well said Ricky!
Affpaying is a definitely fixed. Look at all the shit networks that’ve been open for a week with 20x positive review. At least the site owners making bank, can’t hate. To bad for the suckers who believe the ratings and join sub par networks tho……….
Chris,
Since you didn’t cite a specific example I will say this:
A lot of networks appear on AffPaying.com after they’ve been around for a long time, working and gathering working affiliates, who can leave those 20x positive reviews “overnight”.
AffPaying isn’t a birthplace or a timeline for a network/program, it’s just another place to judge the network’s quality.
That a network/program is “New” on AffPaying doesn’t mean it’s new in general.
Gao isn’t “making a bank”, trust me. Any “Affiliate Marketing” blogger demands ridiculously higher ad rates to advertise a network on, not justified and without the option to leave a comment/review.
Also, and this is from checking roughly half of the listings on AffPaying, there are PLENTY of negative reviews, and a lot of times I based a decision based on aggregated results from AffPaying and OTHER sources.
So, don’t put all your eggs in one basket and you’ll be fine, same as anything else in life.
Affpaying flat out refuses to post negative reviews for Blam/EWA. I had screenshots where they were paying late and making up dumb excuses. The admin offered to mediate for me instead of posting my polite, but critical review.
Scam is a strong word that I would not use, but affpaying is not legit. They are not bold faced liars like the networks I mentioned. They lie through omission in a more cowardly way.
Warrior forum deleted an entire thread about these guys not paying on time. Networks are paying ‘reputation management’ money to site owners.
As would you. Isn’t your point to have your money, rather than try to hurt someone?
If it’s the other way around, don’t be surprised you’re not getting a warm embrace. A late payment is something NO network would ever accept. But denied payments over fraud are a whole other issue.
NO affiliate would love hearing the line:” We suspect you’re a fraudster” especially when 80% of the traffic is alright and the other is shady. But we all love to play it innocent and presenting networks as the ultimate bad guys. Well, guess that’s the reason there are so many hasOffers networks, anyone can do it. It’s also the reason there’s only a handful anyone would really want to work with. Because ANYONE can do it.
Disclaimer: I’m not saying EWA/BlamAds aren’t bad in excusing themselves or are late on responding to inquiries. They may even be condescending and annoying. My reply is on the general side, without talking specifically about any specific network.
Does any one have any news about clove network and right spot, they belong to the same company.
I have worked with them Leadcola, clove network, right spot are same company and they do the same thing in all 3 networks.