Bogus Affiliates From India… Grrr

Can somebody please explain to me why some many fraudulent applications to affiliate programs originate from India? I hate to make such a broad sweeping allegation but speaking from personal experience as an affiliate manager of many affiliate programs I know this to be true.

Lets take a look at just one of my programs and the applications that I’ve reviewed this morning.

Applications today = 47
Applications approved = 40
Applications declined = 7

Out of these 7 declined applications all 7 were from India and all 7 provided no more information other than a random hotmail address (which either bounce or never respond to emails).

I’ve spoken to the affiliate networks about this in the past who recommended I sent up an automatic filter to decline all applications from India. What?! Personally I would never dream of doing such a thing as there could well be a few good guys and possibly top performing affiliates that would fall foul of this filter. Secondly, although it’s very time consuming I prefer to manually review every application on a daily basis so that I can see with my own eyes who is signing up, from where and what their promotional methods may be.

I believe some of the bigger networks that are plagued by such problems should be doing more at the “front door” to identify and stop these bogus affiliates from ever reaching promotion stage. Respect to the many “smaller networks” out there that require valid bank details, matching postal address and email/IP filtering methods.