With a global Alexa traffic rank of 30,154, tvshowsondvd.com has opted not to compete with fellow Amazon affiliates on a level playing field, i.e., this site is defrauding Amazon by forcing affiliate cookies upon its users. If these users make a purchase from Amazon within the next day or so, then Amazon will pay the affiliate associated with this site a commission when none is owed.
Load up this tvshowsondvd.com page in your browser. Click on View then Source and scroll down to line #450, note the 1×1 iframe that is set to load its content from hostloom.com:
The request to hostloom.com will kick off a series of redirects which will eventually result in the browser invisibly loading the entire Amazon.com site within tvshowsondvd.com’s page (via an affiliate link, of course). The offending affiliate id in this scenario is “push2checkcom-20″. You may have some trouble reproducing this for yourself, this is because the affiliate in question has taken additional precautions to thwart investigators. Fortunately, if you can’t reproduce it for yourself, you can go through this packet log summary to verify what’s going on.
Because of this fraudsters effort to conceal what he is up to, he scores a whopping 4/10:
- Cookie-stuffing
- Cycling through Amazon affiliate ids
- Trying to protect himself from investigators by checking the referrer
- Not always initiating the attack despite having the correct referrer
