Shocked to learn that Brian Dunning has done this. I've been listening to his Skeptoid podcast for years. I always pictured someone of modest or middle class means because he solicits donations to help keep the podcast going. I didn't think he was also making millions from fraud. Ironically, 'consumer frauds' is one of things he has listed on his website as a target of his skeptical inquiry.<p>Found this blog post with court documents and background:
<a href="http://www.skepticalabyss.com/?p=291" rel="nofollow">http://www.skepticalabyss.com/?p=291</a><p>EDIT:
Found this old blog post by Brian Dunning:
<a href="http://skeptoid.com/blog/2011/10/05/a-partial-explanation/" rel="nofollow">http://skeptoid.com/blog/2011/10/05/a-partial-explanation/</a><p>"Cookie stuffing refers to a web site writing a cookie to your browser without your knowledge or permission. ... It’s a scary-sounding term, but it’s fundamental to the way Internet advertising works. ... Cookie stuffing is more than just a standard practice; it’s an essential component of the mechanics of serving ads effectively."
Ahh this brings back some memories.<p>The articles mentions the guy who made the cooking stuffing software. He was pretty active on a private part of a forum I'm still part of.<p>Anyway eBay went after the forum as well, and promptly deleted his account and all the threads mentioning eBay. They also moved their servers offshore and deleted pretty much every thread that mentioned eBay in it.<p>I do remember he wrote a massive long thread about how the FBI raided his house and seized all his computers. He said the FBI agents weren't even told why they were conducting a raid on him and actually felt kind of sorry for him. He charged a pretty hefty price for the software ($500/month for the basic plan), but it was pretty advanced. They figured out that they could spoof referrers in flash, so rather then have a 1x1px image file, it was a tiny .swf file.<p>People were banking on that though, eBay first, then Amazon. You could buy shitty porn traffic and parked domain traffic for literally $1-2/1000 uniques visitors and stuff them all with cookies.<p>It was also round the same time Craigslist cracked down on affiliate marketers. People were literally getting hundreds of conversions a day on rebill offers like credit ratings and dating verification offers. One guy fled to South America so Craiglist and the FBI couldn't find him as he was literally making 6 figures a day.<p>I probably have said too much, but now everyone is pretty smart now.
Facebook were the last ones to smarten their act up since their whole system/backend had so many loopholes in there it wasn't funny. Plus their security team only worked Monday-Friday, so if you noticed up until 2012, there would be a bunch of spam on your feed during the weekends.
> Much of Hogan's apartment was a clutter of screens, hard drives and keyboards — which the FBI confiscated.<p>That must have been some very advanced and dangerous looking screens and keyboards.<p>Why do we still accept this kind of confiscation of unrelated goods, while throwing big objections if the police had confiscated jewelery, clothes, or anything other non-connected but expensive items? By now, for all the tons of electronic items confiscated during raids, has any single screen or keyboard ever been part of the evidence provided to a court?
"The problem with affiliate marketing is that there isn't much money in it."<p>A better statement would be: "The problem with the eBay affiliate program is that there isn't much money in it."<p>This is not a problem with affiliate marketing in general.
"So eBay installed a tiny “gif” file on its homepage. A gif is simply an image file. This one was so tiny no one could see it. It sat there invisibly."
I came really close to getting into cookie stuffing back in its heyday. I'm really glad I didn't. No one gave a second thought to it 5 years ago. I never once saw the words "fraud" and "cookie stuffing" on the same page.<p>Around that time I worked on finding ways to do untraceable cookie stuffing. Bouncing people through SSL to kill the referer, using Flash, etc. I even found a security hole in IE that gave me access to cross domain iframes. That was killer because you could load another site in an iframe then use JS to click an affiliate link or manipulate the page, making it appear completely legit.<p>Luckily it never went past research. I registered a domain and planned on creating a cookie stuffing service but never finished it and never did any actual cookie stuffing.
Real Quick: Just wondering, what if you made a browser extension that replaced all the links a user saw on every page they visited to affiliates links from Amazon and Ebay? Would that work?