Brian Andrew Dunning from Skeptoid is accused of using black hat tactics to squeeze 5.2 milion from eBay. The FBI is involved. Dunning pled guilty to fraud. It’s a twisting story that will probably take years to unravel. In the mean time, Ars Technica has an interesting article on the subject.
Between May 2006 and June 2007, Brian Andrew Dunning made $5.2 million—all of it from eBay. Dunning wasn’t selling Velvet Elvis posters and antique dinner plates through the auction site, however. He earned the money from affiliate commissions, getting paid whenever he directed people to eBay and they made purchases or won auctions. He was so successful at driving this traffic to eBay that his company, Kessler’s Flying Circus, became the number two eBay affiliate in the entire world.
Woah. 5.2 MILLION? I’m an Amazon affiliate and, er, I’ve gotta tell you, it’s hardly worth it. At .20 – .40 cents per book referred, there are days when I receive a surprise check for DOZENS of dollars! It’s enough to buy myself a, well, book.
Evidently Dunning’s numbers got so high that eBay got suspicious. Turns out that some of the free software Dunning created inserted some suspicious cookies into the user’s computer.
But according to the feds, Dunning used free programs like WhoLinked to do far more than this. When a blog page containing WhoLinked was loaded, WhoLinked generated a silent “ad clickthrough” to eBay in the background. Users would see nothing, but eBay would serve up a cookie containing the Kessler’s Flying Circus affiliate link. The user’s Web browser would dutifully save the cookie and, the next time that user visited eBay, any affiliate revenue generated went to Dunning and company. In such cases, users had never seen an eBay ad, nor had they clicked on anything eBay-related. These were not cases in which eBay wanted to pay affiliates.
EBay and the US Government isn’t amused and they’re apparently going for broke on this one.
The government wanted Dunning to forfeit “all property constituting, and derived from, proceeds the defendant obtained, directly and indirectly, as the result of those violations.” In other words, it wanted the full $5.2 million. While admitting to the general contours of the eBay cookie-stuffing scheme, Dunning insisted that these only accounted for some portion of the $5.2 million total. A separate evidentiary hearing on August 8 will determine exactly how much of that amount was fraudulent.
Cookie stuffing isn’t new; neither are eBay lawsuits to stop it. But the sheer success that Kessler’s Flying Circus achieved with the technique was, admittedly, remarkable.
Very disappointing, indeed.
You can read Dunning’s response here.
