Identity Thief Buying Advertising

and we thought thieves only buy goods (preferably expensive)

[alika]

We have an advertiser who bought advertising space from us in March for a 1-month campaign. The campaign did well, we think, as they came back and renewed their campaign again this May, and this time for 6 months. We thought everything's good.

Until today when we got a chargeback notice from our merchant account provider. Our merchant account provider enclosed the documents submitted by the credit card owner disputing the charges, and in it is a loooong list of merchants where the card was used, one of which is our company. With us, it was for advertising while the rest were for business related expenses as well (e.g. trade show materials, servers, etc.). I talked with the owner of the credit card - the card is a company card and they have since closed it upon seeing a lot of questionable charges on their statement.

I was not expecting to see credit card fraud in the advertising arena, thinking that it is more likely in the ecommerce field. Moreso given that this advertiser has a very very nice and extremely professional looking website (they are in the merchant reselling business). They are newish in the business with 0 backlicks to date.

Our mistake was we only checked the advertiser's website, and not much else. We should have looked into their BBB report, which states that BBB sent them a mail but was returned by the post office (that should have been a warning sign). We should also have crosschecked the address on the website (NY), and the credit card (Cincinnati, and for the new 6 month campaign, the card used was Connecticut). Of course, we cancelled their current advertising campaign and promptly reimbursed the cardholder (whoever it may be).

This identity theft thing is creeping me out. Has anyone experienced this in their advertising business?

[StephenBauer]

Seems like it would be easier to find the culprit in this situation than a lone card wielder just going on a buying frenzy. They have to be buying traffic to send somewhere...even if it was filtered through a few dummy sites you think they could narrow down the beneficiaries of said traffic still. Probably an ex-employee or family member of an employee.

People are crazy.

[ShareASale]

I see it, quite frankly way too often - and is only growing. Advertising is an easy target as there are no goods shipped, thus no problem matching the shipping address/billing address, etc...

[alika]

Yes. It is hard for publishers victimized by scams such as these to dispute charges. Advertisers can always say, "Hey, show me proof that you provided me with any service - my ad never appeared on your site."

What I don't understand is why would anyone think they can pull this off -- afterall, when they buy advertising, it will lead to somewhere. In this case, the click through URL leads to a very decent e-business website offering a merchant reseller program. It's not even a crummy looking free-hosted website. Now I fear for those who signed up with them -- this identity thief now has a whole range of credit cards to use! Worse, I feel bad for those who signed up through the ads they saw on our website.