The internet has become a minefield of new business opportunities in the last few years, allowing different segments of the market and niches to have an opportunity to reach out on the net to target audiences. This power of business making is thanks to affiliate marketing.

What's Affiliate Marketing?
It's been around for at least ten years or so but it's just recently that new scams have arisen, a technical problem called affiliate fraud. Wherever money is involved, affiliate fraud is possible and it is a sign that it's not likely to stop.

Many merchants may not be aware of this phenomenon so they might not know how to fight fraud in these affiliate networks.

What's Affiliate Fraud?
Affiliate fraud is the title given to any kind of illegal action designed to cheat individual merchants, buyers or other affiliates. The merchants can be asked to pay commissions, something they shouldn't be doing since fraud affiliates try to mislead merchants as best as they can.

How do you recognize an affiliate fraud and what should you do about it?
If you have an affiliate program running and notice things not working out the way you wanted it to, it might be time to do some serious research. You should use your specialized workforce to check your logs for any suspicious activity or unusual pattern of activity. Outsourcing your marketing to an affiliate network both eliminates and counters frauds. Some fraudsters copy the style and the contents of popular websites in order to mislead those of the target audience, directing traffic to the wrong website and confusing the merchant who loses out on website traffic, and hence income.

Affiliate Fraud Preventing Tips
If you outsource affiliate marketing to a network, you can use these following techniques:
o Checking the content in the site to see if it relates to what you're trying to sell.

o Checking if your affiliate has an active webpage.

o Keeping in touch with your affiliate

o Checking if the site of your affiliate is optimized according to the contents of your website.

o CPC campaigns that are in place should include anti-fraud items such as cookies that check if a link was clicked more than once from the same IP address in a short span of time. The information allows you to single out fraudsters and eliminate them.

o It could be time consuming but you can get manual approval for all affiliate applications. This allows for easier reviewing of applicants and can even call them up to see if they're serious.

o "Trim" your affiliate list, keeping just the good ones and tag the bad ones.

o Join forums and discuss with merchants about anti-affiliate programs and black list the URLs of fraudsters.

Fraud prevention isn't easy but monitoring everything with your affiliates can reduce frauds. Attention to detail should be given to warning signals. Do everything to protect your business, share whatever original results and opinions, on forums that help detect and prevent online fraud.