How You Could Be Running Incentive Based Marketing Without Knowing it.

This past week we have been receiving a large volume of spam email. It's no shock that most of it had to do with eliminating credit card debts. However, one email in particular caught my eye as it gave a cash incentive to click on it, so I did. The discovery I made after that was astounding.

Here is the email:

Next is the landing page this email takes you to.
Note: the URL in the email ad expired after 24 hours.
The web address is: www.consolidate-my-debt-now.com

Here is the Landing /Listing page:

At the top right you will see the offer has not increased to $1,500 towards reducing your debt. Below there is the traditional listing of Yahoo advertisers in this space. My first thought is, wow, I wonder if ALL these advertisers are offering the $1,500 prize program?
The double bonus discovery in this adventure is that one advertiser who regularly scams all 3 search engines with multiple domains listings for the same company has all three of their listings on this scammers site... (Or perhaps this is their email ad campaign???)

The domain name for consolidate-my-debt-now.com has a private registration through godaddy.com. Their DNS entry:

1. FreedomeDebtRelief.com
2. FreedomFinancialNetwork.com
3. FreedomDebtHelp.com

All these names are registered to the same company and or slight variation to the same address... and if you research the business you come to find out that all these sites are actually owned/managed and or otherwise run by Andrew Housser who owns www.Bills.com

However this is no big news as Yahoo has blatantly allowed multiple listings from the same clients for at least the past year. I have had account reps tell me directly, "don't ask don't tell" as long as you pay the bill, we can run your campaigns. Mr. Housser has had this little scam running on Google, Yahoo and MSN for a while now.

But back to the final result. If you click on any of these listings you will see within the resulting URL the Search Engine's identifier; YAHOO.

Does, Mr. Housser know he is running incentive based marketing? Well I'll give him the benefit of the doubt here. Surely none of his MANY websites have produced clicks and conversions that have shown up in his placement reports to identify the Consolidate-my-debt-now.com website. I bet he knows now - You're welcome.

So there you have it, one scammer catching another in a scam. I don't know if we should cheer or sneer?

In any case this is just one more example that Yahoo is wide open right now and willing to allow anything to bring in the cash they are so desperate for.

Keep your guard up if you are one of the few who are still advertising on Yahoo's content network. Run regular placement reports and be sure to go visit some of those websites and see what they are all about.

If you have a sacrificial computer kicking around, use it to explore spam email, and other obviously risky websites. You may find your own company is being advertised in a bad neighborhood.