So i posted a while back, about how i made a small little bot to auto fill CPA offers. And yeah, its Fraud. And i would never even think to do such a thing nowadays. And i clearly stated that in the post, but some people still tried to convince me that it was just like “Getting your own back”. I had many conversations with people over it, but they always  flowed in two different directions.

1. “CPA Networks have been ripping off people years with shaving/scrubbing like maniacs. Whats wrong with getting some of that back”.
2. “CPA Network offers always rip off people with those “Free Laptops”, i mean who actually gets a free laptop” <– Actually not that bad of a point.

First lets talk about the similarities between the two arguments, and then ill go into them individually. First off, just because you don’t like something, or don’t like how something is run, does not mean you can do illegal deeds to set things straight. If you walked into a store, and saw that prices were sky high and ridiculous over priced, does it give you the right to then shop lift? Even if we go deep into law, retaliation never gets you off any crime. Even crimes of passion, (Finding your wife in bed with someone else, then going beserk), does not lift all the onus off you.

Point 1

Although this mostly falls on the above, scrubbing leads is actually not an unknown or devious concept. I think most people get shaving and scrubbing mixed up. Scrubbing is remove BS leads, or leads that don’t fall under certain criteria. So if the advertiser is looking for only males to sign up to their offer, and a female signs up. Then that lead will be scrubbed/removed. Some advertisers come out in the open and tell you what is scrubbed and what isnt, others are more devious and kind of keep it behind locked doors.

Shaving is the process of removing leads without any real reason. Most commonly its to keep a CPA offer profitable. The thing you have to realize about CPA is that an email address is worth only so much. And that lead has to do some offers on the back end, or convert some other way for the advertiser otherwise its worthless. The more crap leads the advertiser gets, the more he has to shave to keep afloat. As you can probably see, sending fraudulent leads to an advertiser, well that’s never going to work out in the backend. And so the advertiser will have to raise his shaving rates further to string together a profit. So while you think that your doing the world some good getting your own back by teaching those good for nothing shaving networks a lesson, your actually the one causing the high shaving rates.

Point 2

To be honest, i don’t actually know whether people actually get sent this junk. One would assume so as there is really no reason to not send it. The lead has to do a trillion offers on the back end to receive it though, and probably would have been better off getting a minimum wage job to earn the money to buy the item. Logic would probably tell us that there really isn’t enough “Free Offers” to do on the backend to work up enough money to get a $500 laptop. And to get it you more then likely would have to do a rebill (<– sucks). Although once again, your not the hero of the day by sending fraud leads. And once again, the advertiser will just make the legit leads do even more crappy offers to get his money back.

At the end of the day, sending Fraud leads to CPA Submit Offers, is partly what is causing such high shaving and BS tactics by advertisers. Thinking that you are doing good by ripping them off further will only mean they have to further penalize legit publishers to get their money back.