While there is room between what Clause says and the reality, I’ve always insisted that there is fraud over there. Why? Because it’s in human nature.
Which company and which person would not be tempted to diminishes the figures in a backend where nothing is shown in real-time? Or to develop poor tracking to get 1 out of 3 sales tracked at all?
Through I’ve no *hard* evidence to prove anything apart screen captures, I’ve seen so many things with lots of affiliate programs that I take this now as a fact and work with the *fraud* as a parameter in my business. I’ve seen lots of things that would say that I got players playing while I was seeing noting in stats.
On example? I got some ‘proves’ with Casino Shield. I pushed a little this software, because I was finding this software interesting. One thing that is great in their stats is that you can see exactly which online casinos YOUR players are playing. All those that have downloaded the software via your site and use the software are showing up each time they play and which casino they play (with no personal information of course).
I pushed people to download CS in my mailing list, once people confirmed their subscription. So that’s quality players/traffic that were following us, because they got our newsletters.
Guess what? In the casinos list they played the most, the top 10 were casinos where I was making the less money. Contradictory… You can say that it’s because they already got the casinos installed before they use CS through us… But on over 1050 casino sessions, it leaves some doubts, when you are marketing those casinos heavily and even inside the software, and that you know, by monitoring your traffic and clicks, that there you *are* sending people going to those casinos.
While everything is not black, we are far from the 100% white as well.
Those are my 2 cents. I know a lot disagree with my opinion, but take it as this. It is my opinion based on my short experience.