Partnërka in Crime: Characterizing Deceptive Affiliate Marketing Offers

The deceptive affiliate marketing ecosystem enables a variety of online scams causing consumers to lose money or personal data. In this model, affiliates promote deceptive products and services on behalf of merchants in exchange for a commission, mediated by affiliate networks. We monitor the ecosystem holistically by taking the vantage point of affiliates and collecting ground truth from 23 aggregators that list deceptive products and services available for promotion across scam types and affiliate networks. Using our novel longitudinal data set, we characterize the ecosystem by taxonomizing the 9 main categories of deceptive products and services composing the ecosystem, and describing the main tactics used to mislead consumers. We quantify the extent of the nearly 450,000 offers in the ecosystem and the differences in the value that is attached to different types of scams, monetization models, and countries. Finally, we identify core affiliate networks and analyze longitudinal trends to track the dynamics of the ecosystem over time. The more complete coverage provided by our novel data set enables not only a broader understanding of the ecosystem, but also adds insights and metadata for developing earlier, data-driven interventions to protect consumers.