I wanted to bring more attention to recent news that exposed a Mozilla Firefox browser plugin that overwrites legitimate Affiliate cookies, with the author’s (author of the plugin) Affiliate cookie. It’s not surprising that the savvy membership base at ABestWeb first brought light to this Add-on that literally rips off honest Affiliates, and merchants…for that matter! Here is the thread that was started by member jtoskey on September 29th, and it’s still actively growing in post count now on ABW:
Firefox promoting cashback add-on
From the thread, post No. 27…
Right after they click your link, it’s redirected thru their own affiliate link. Traffic hijacking basically…
Jangro.com followed up on the ABW thread with a very thorough report…
The developer of this program doesn’t seem to have done his homework on “How to play nice as an incentive affiliate with a browser plugin.” It’s a bit surprising to see a tool like this appear without any apparent awareness to the issues that surround it.
The author of this plugin is not an active AvantLink Affiliate, and won’t ever be. The good news is that it appears that most networks are now removing the Affiliate account behind this FF plug in. That’s good news, but of course how many people already have it configured on their browser?
At any rate, THANKS ABW (and jtoskey) for exposing this!
Gary & AvantLink
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1Halloween Contest on Oct 5, 2007 at 10:37 am:
Great find and thanks for writing about this. FireFox plugins are popular and easy to code. I can imagine we will see more affiliate hijacking in the future.
H.C.
2Renee on Oct 11, 2007 at 11:46 pm:
A great irony is this excerpt from their TOS:
“As a member of CashAddOn, you agree not to abuse CashAddOn. This includes, but is not limited to, using multiple accounts, attempting to earn cash through adding this extension to computers that you do not have the rights to, fraudulent methods, and tampering with the links used in order to improperly earn cash back. CashAddOn reserves the right to terminate any CashAddOn Member’s account if CashAddOn believes that the member has violated any part of this agreement…”
They object to fraudulent methods & people tampering with the links used in order to improperly earn cash back? Chutzpah to the max!