To be honest, this was not a surprise for me. Back in 2008 I have caught the same person cheating… Last year I had several giveaway events set up using the Giveaway Manager 2 script… As you may know, when a giveaway event set up with this script opens for regular members sign-up, all the visitors of the contributors sign-up page are automatically redirected to the members sign-up page, so nobody can sign-up as a contributor anymore…

I don’t know how, but this cheater managed to get people to sign-up as contributors AFTER the event started to accept members, and due to this fact he increased the ranking of his gift (an affiliate usually gets more ranking points for bringging in contributors)…

I have banned him on one of my past events and accepted him back only after he promised that will be a good boy and will not use his cheating system again (at least on my sites)…

A few days ago I have discovered that this person has found another way to cheat: stealing commissions… I have discovered that when he was stealing my commissions for The Apprentice Giveaway…

When a new event is announced, a lot of marketers are sending out promotional messages… Usually, I open the first message that gets my attention, click the link inside that message, sign up, upgrade (or not), etc,…

Well, our cheater has a different approach… But first, for better understanding, let’s give him a name: I’ll call him Mr. Z

The cheating technique is very simple:

Mr. Z is not signing up directly through the affiliate link of his referrer…

First he uses a phoney name: let’s call this one Mr. V… He signs up as Mr. V, skips the OTO(s), and grabs the affiliate link…

After that, he signs up as Mr. Z using Mr. V’s affiliate link, pays for the upgrade, and starts promoting his new affiliate link…

This works very well with the giveaway sites using Giveaway Manager 2 and the sites using Ultimate JV Giveaway Script if the instant affiliate payments are not enabled and all the commissions are paid usually at the end of that event, through a mass payment…

So the referrer gets no commissions and Mr. V gets the commissions instead…

Also, Mr. V has the nasty habit to sign up for new giveaways through my affiliate link… He  really loves me, doesn’t he? This way, Mr. Z have stolen my commissions for his sign up for The Apprentice Giveaway and for many other past events…

I have checked my stats for all my past events and I have no doubt about what I am talking here… But there is more: as you know, all decent autoresponder sites are capturing the IP address of the subscriber… I have checked my autoresponder accounts for those events and guess what? Mr. Z and Mr. V are sharing the exact same IP address…

I have not the time to check this issue thoroughly, but I have reasons to believe that not all his referral are real persons and not some phoney email addresses…

If you want to know who Mr. V is, go to (almost) any giveaway event and look for a contributor that has 0 member referrals and (usually) only 1(one) contributor referral (upgraded, of course)… Also, Mr. V never submits a gift…

These techniques reminds me of a famous cheater, exposed last year: Michael Pinder, aka Daniel Armstrong, aka a big list of phoney names, too long to put it here… I have no proof for what I’m about to tell you, but I think that Mr. Z, aka Mr. V is in fact Michael Pinder, aka Daniel Armstrong aka whatever-you-want-to-call-him… But, like I’ve just said, I have no proof for that and this is strictly my opinion and MUST NOT be taken as a real fact…

Due to this fact, I will not publicly expose this cheater’s name, but all the well know giveaway events owners are invited to contact me for details…

Also, I will allow Mr. Z / Mr. V to reply and defend himself BEFORE deleting his accounts on the 2 giveaway events of mine that are still opened… Just to be fair….

Finally, I am inviting all of you comment below… BTW, I have the "Do Follow" plugin activated on this blog and I will approve all decent comments… One restriction applies: If you can guess who Mr. Z / Mr. V is, don’t reveal that on your comment…