It cannot be an affiliate, as I assume it costs them abt USD 20-30 K a day. Affiliate margins are not high enough to cover this. Please also note that affiliates get paid by cheque weeks later after the online deal is completed. Some more sinister play is at work here. Also constantly new domains are thrown in. All are forwarding domains, some landing domains don't even work! This is not just a naive affiliate. His credit card/s spending limit is far too high. I suspect this to be an initiative to interrupt cash flow for 'normal' advertisers. What we see is just a false front. Whoever does this has exposed a weak side to the google PPC ad system and does not mind to spend the money to exploit this.
I trust each of us driving our reps. crazy. We do. After endless mails we got a response saying that google has the tools in place, yet if double advertisers change URL's randomly the system is slow to pick that up.
Double serving ads continue today (Monday/Asia time), again on a big scale. So if google can't help what to do? The answer is simple. Watch, wait, if not action on googles behalf is taken, work hard to finding/building other ad/revenue channels.
I have no proof of the above BUT have many factors that lead me to believe this. Google has all but acknowledged this. They have assured me they are working to prevent them from continuing to open fake accounts. Small comfort after dealing with this the past few weeks.
I suggest to keep calling when you see the ads and demand they be removed immediately. This strategy seems to work.
To open an account somewhere in the Bahamas would be easy for the Turkish guy (if this is not a decoy). Let's say he closes abt. 200 bookings a day (low estimate) at abt. USD 175 average that is at 5% affiliate fee USD 1,750 a day x 30 days = USD 52,500 per month. Hmmmmm... I suppose to randomize the stolen cards he would buy them at a bulk.
Google should watch this carefully. After all, they would facilitate this kind of scam via their services.
have the distinct feeling google does not care. and yes you are right, jimberan, google will face massive dispute cases if this is driven by credit card fraud.
but hey...no one can say google was note informed.
These people obviously are not paying for these ads. They are bidding very high with 5 ads appearing at once all stacked up together. This is a massive fraud.
We are contacting the companies that these are affiliates of and notifying them that these people are commtting fraud which is in violation of their affiliate agreements. Everyone should do this. Hopefully they won't get paid.
This is beyond ridiculous
Having spoken with the people involved, I feel confident that the concerns expressed in this thread (and to our support teams) have been well understood, that the issue is being taken very seriously indeed by the right folks, and that work is well underway towards a resolution.
Beyond that, I both value and share your concerns for the quality of the ads being shown in AdWords, the consequent quality of our user's experience with those ads, and also the quality of your experience as advertisers who would like to compete on a level playing field. It is understood here at AdWords that all of these things are absolutely key to your success, and to ours as well.
AWA
I did discuss what I feel is a more then reasonable which would be some form of click credit or compensation to ofset the loss of income that this has caused without G having been able to stop this. It wasnt dismissed and would be something they would look into. I certainly hope so!
Seems this forum has worked well. Excellent and thanks to Jimberan for raising this issue. And yes thanks for AWA for raising the alarm bells with google, guess the idea of massive charge backs did not sit well.
Maybe an idea for webmasterworld, a special forum for 'online travel'.
Thanks
On the other hand, the basta&% from Turkey is back and he is now immitating lastminute dot com and it aint them advertising.
latehotels
lastminutshotels
bestaccomodation
Very gutsy our Turkish friend. If this is really paid for by stolen card details, then google better watch out cause card disputes are nasty. From my experience card holder is entitled to full refund in this case.
How to stop this guy?
However - the fact that this has gone on for weeks is nuts! Why cant Google simply block their Destination URL's (including affiliate ID)? This would eliminate most of their ads. All but the ones that go to their own domains.
Why when Google is informed of bogus ads, which are OBVIOUSLY fraudulent, does it take hours to remove?
This has been EXTREMELY frustrating, time consuming and most importantly costly.
BTW ... they are back again!
Key words: Dubai Hotels
FIVE out of 8 ads on first page are the Turkish guy, what a bullocks, he google, this is seriously interupting business for guys like Wired and myself. This aint cool
However, I didn't click on any ads - I just examined the URLs for duplicate destinations.
I did find one ad that has a non-existent domain name in the display URL (or else it is too new to look up) and the destination URL doesn't match the display URL. The destination URL is rates to go.
Is this what you are talking about?
I don't understand why Google's display/destination URL checking is not automated and immediate. i.e. you shouldn't be able to enter an ad where the display URL's domain and the domain of the final destination don't match.
And they need to get sneaky and forge a common web browser user-agent when they do the check, to prevent cloaking.
1. Display URL must match Destination URL
2. All exceptions must be reviewed before ad goes live
This would not eliminate all ad violations but this would sure stop a lot of them.
For example check out macau hotels, he is holding 3 out of top 4 spots. This f... sucks
<ads removed>
[edited by: eWhisper at 10:47 pm (utc) on Jan. 25, 2006]
[edit reason] Please don't post ads. Copyright issues. [/edit]
One of those is the one that I noticed previously.
Of the three domain names listed, two are either not registered at all, or too new to have hit the root servers yet.
The one domain name that IS registered was registered in 2002 to somebody in Belgium.
I suspect that whoever is placing these ads is just making-up the domain names that they use in the Display URL, and isn't even bothering to register their own domain names.
They are just taking advantage of the lack of immediate checking by Google, and then the ads go live on Google Search for several days until they are checked.
My own experience has been that Google's checking of display URLs is lax, and they continue to run ads that violate the rules, even weeks after they have been reported to them.
I wonder what percentage of the ads on Adwords have similar violations? How much revenue would Google lose if they enforced this provision strictly?
It may not be a pretty answer.
Edit: I just found another one that looks like it's probably the same guy. This one was actually registered to somebody in Turkey, the display URL matches the destination URL, but it redirects to a travel affiliate program.
There isn't just one affiliate program he is using. It is multiple affiliate programs, and he is using multiple techniques to get around Google rules.
In some cases, the domain names are registered to somebody in Turkey. In other cases, they aren't registered at all, or may be registered to some third-party who probably doesn't know their domain name is being used in the Display URLs. Where he is using unregistered or third-party domain names, he just uses the affiliate URL directly in the destination. Where he actually owns the domain, he does a redirect. He's doing a pretty good job of mixing-up his techniques and making it hard to track and eliminate.
The only way to stop this is for Google to actually enforce their stated rules, absolutely, and automatically.
Until they do, the Adwords system is a farce. Scammers the world over are going to get ahold of this and have a field day, otherwise.
Today it is hotels. Next week it will be every keyword you can think of. Maybe it already is.
I think that is the big fear. Today it is travel and next week it is widgets and thingamgigs etc. If the person is not at all worried about the cost of a click, it tends to goof up the whole system.
Until then, it just isn't in Google's self-interest to stop this.
So, maybe if this gets out on the scammer's grapevine as the latest easy scam, it might be the best thing that's happened to Adwords in a long time.
Whoever is behind this is no dummy. The endless supply of domains makes it impossible to detect this. Our rep. mentioned that google has no real tools in place to detect double bidding. I guess they never expected a card fraudster to take advantage of their system on this scale.
So all legit advertisers can do is being vigilant. Also jimberan had a point with re-imbursements of lost revenue. Bottom line the fraudster is costing hundreds of legit advertisers loss in revenue.
Should get traditional media/news involved in this. Kind of the first case of PPC ad high jack, or a new way of card fraud (if this is the case).
