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So by now I'm sure many of you are wondering what ever happened to the Market Leverage issue I had.
If you don't know, the basic to the story is that both my friend and I were hacked and had our jump links replaced with Market Leverage affiliate links. We decided to contact them and try to get as much information about the hacker as possible...
My friend's site was redirecting to the market leverage hacker affiliate for just a few hours while mine was down a bit longer.
At first, Market Leverage seemed to be somewhat helpful. They called me and my friend and told us the normal, "We can't tell you anything blah blah." The only way we would be able to get information is to sue John Doe and get a court order to view Market Leverages log files / affiliate information.
They were trying to be helpful while really saying, "You're not going to get anything..."
Assuming that I would want to pay thousands of dollars to try to regain around $x,xxx in lost advertising revenue for a lawyer to try and go through the process...
Well today I got an email from Market Leverage saying that they pretty much found nothing.
What actually made me laugh was when Market Leverage told me that the hacker affiliate of theirs that the traffic was going to denied all claims. Duh...
What's even more interesting is that my friend provided them with a log of 300+ unique IP addresses that came to his site during the time that it was being redirected to the Market Leverage hacker affiliate link.
According to their logs, not a single ip matched for the time period... Hmm.
What's even better is that Market Leverage said that the affiliates did not see any abnormal jump in affiliate commissions and so they can't find any connection.
So apparently, to Market Leverage neither event ever actually happened it seems.
All in all, Market Leverage has TRIED to do what they can but at least in this case, the person who did wrong walks away with no correction and nothing done to them. Lame...
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You mean the hacker still has his marketleverage account?
And has marketleverage even said they are taking steps and working with their programmers to prevent things like this from happening?
No bueno.
Does that mean you’re not going to be promoting ML anymore?
Hi Johnathan – Love the blog. I’m sorry you had to deal with this situation.
I was wondering, how were you able to catch the affiliate link swap so fast? Are you a click junkie? lol…jk Seriously, I don’t always watch my campaigns that closely. If that happened to me, I’d probably lose a whole day.
How do you protect yourself from this? Might be a good blog entry.
Hey Jon, I have been following this story since you first posted it and the fact that Market Leverage is putting their head in the sand and denying they even have evidence of this shows very badly on them. Apparently they think they are the 800 lb gorilla in the room already. I will NEVER use Market Leverage with a company that turns it back on such fraudulent activity. The log files don’t lie.
Corey
I stopped all my traffic to Market Leverage. There are so many other good options out there.
By the way, you are still promoting them on your blog…
I’m glad they won’t just give out their affiliates info just because you say so. Says a lot about them and definitely would make me feel more secure in using them, compared to say them dropping everything and handing over all the info because a blogger said so.
Tell them to look at the referring URLs for commissions, your landing page should be there.
Why are you still promoting them with the peel away ad? Or did your site get hacked again?
It’s possible that they don’t have the logs. It’s not uncommon for people to not put preventative measures in until a problem happens. Yes it’s lazy, but it does happen.
So while I’m not saying that makes it OK, I’m just saying, they really could have TRIED but not had the info available on their end to match it up. I mean 300 IPs, referring URLs, etc would show up SOMEWHERE if the proper logs were there..
@Paul – If the person had the ability to hack into a site I’m sure they would know how to hide the referring url from the network.
@Johathan – Still sorry to hear about this and it’s weird that they couldn’t find anything fishy at all but at the end of the day no legitimate network is going to give out that info, especially not to another affiliate so it’s hard to fault them for that. The hacker will get what is coming to him in good time, carma is a bitch like that.
OK Jon, what if I take one of YOUR affiliate links, and hack into someones site and replace their links with yours?
Imagine if that person went to Market Leverage and asked them to ban the account holder of the links. You see why they can’t do anything? There’s nothing to prove.
My guess is that the affiliate who hijacked your links is a big earner for ML and they don’t to bring him forward.
[...] Volk updates us on his Market Leverage Hackers in which hackers tapped into his and his friends landing page and replaced it with their own losing [...]
[...] of Affiliate Commission fraud that I’ve come across. The first story that broke was from Jonathan Volk and one of his friends. Basically some one hacked into their affiliate sites and changed their [...]
Thats strange man.
I want to promote my blog how many strategies I will have to adopt to get good page rank and traffic.