Parasite Affiliates Back to the Fore

Well it seems like quite a while since anything exciting happened in the world of parasitic affiliate marketing, but this week we seem to have seen things bubble back up again.

Firstly Ben Edelman released his cool new report entitled Debunking ShopAtHomeSelect which is focused on the violation of affiliate marketing network rules by ShopAtHomeSelect and their GoldenRetriever / SelectRebates software. The name change happened very quietly a few weeks ago, and no doubt had nothing at all to do with all the great information one can find about it on google .

Meanwhile a few new parasites surface, with a lot of focus being place on one particulary nasty one calling themselves a range of things : Rebate Retriever / Vertical Theories / Personal Money Tree and Meridian Business Ventures, according to reports they aren't declaring the use of software in their CJ account (violation I believe) and are certainly targeting merchant brand names directly from the software without user interaction... lots of value added sales there!

And to top off an exciting month (start off actually) we had the nice people at CoolWebSearch installing spyware on consumers PCs to steal personal information of all kinds, great work finding and reporting this by the guys at Sunbelt Software, you can read more about this here.