The Anti-virus Times

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Doctor Web news posts often mention referral programmes. Here is an example:

What partnership and referral programmes are we talking about? And how can they harm users?

There is nothing inherently wrong about the idea of referral programmes. Incentives of this sort can be used to promote various projects on the Internet or make them more profitable. But the problem is that many such programmes are fraudulent and can be used with malicious intent.

Here are a few examples of the dubious programmes:

• People host links and banners from other sites participating in the programme on their own sites and get paid for each click. A programme of this kind can be used to draw visitors to certain sites and make them appear at the top of search results.
• Advertisements for goods in online stores with a certain percentage being paid from every purchase. Can be used to promote scams.
• Pay-per-action programmes. In this case, the participants are paid for specific actions performed by users who open links under the referral programme. The actions may include registering on a website, purchasing goods, taking out a bank loan, etc.
• Cash-per-file. Here participants can be paid for file downloads or when archived contents are extracted. A scheme using the second option is described at the beginning of this issue.
• A percentage payment per SMS or email. In theory, participants are promised 70%-80% per SMS from any user they engage. In reality, such offers often conceal fraud schemes or lure people into sending messages for spammers.
• Pass CAPTCHA tests.
• Allow ads to be displayed in a browser.
• Install applications whose authors want to promote them by increasing the frequency with which they are downloaded and installed on smart phones. These programmes can be abused to promote malware and infect mobile devices.

We've only mentioned some partnership programme options—many more exist. But we think that you've gotten the idea. Some companies don't want to invest in conventional offline marketing. They'd rather provide incentives for partners and offer them a share of their profits. We do believe that legitimate and respected companies also use referral and partnership programmes to promote their business. But the arrangements under some of the programmes can easily turn them into fraud schemes.

And both parties in a scheme can be defrauding each other—this often happens in pay-per-click and pay-per-ad programmes.