Ebates for rebates: device identification stops fraud in affiliate marketing
I am one of those consumers who disappoints companies by following through on rebates. Last week I meticulously followed all the rebate instructions for $60 back on a new set of tires for my car. Time will tell if I followed their detailed instructions to the letter like writing the name of the rebate program on the envelope EXACTLY where they wanted me to. Many of the companies offering rebate programs are counting on buyers not to remember to mail the coupons—a phenomenon known in the industry as breakage, or the shoebox effect. Or they count on “slippage” where the consumer has their rebate fulfilled but they lose or forget to cash the check. I am not one to “break” or “slip” when it comes to rebates—and the popular online cashback shopping site Ebates is no exception.
Ebates makes it easy to save money shopping by splitting the commission paid by the online stores in their network with you-the buyer. All you do is join Ebates (it’s free) and pass through the Ebates website to a partner store to make a purchase. Then Ebates pays members their portion of the commission as a rebate. So far Ebates has paid out an impressive $40M to members in rebates. So, what’s all this got to do with online fraud? Just ask Kevin Johnson, Ebates President and CEO.
Fraudsters try to use Ebates as a jumping-off point to use stolen credit cards at merchants in the Ebates merchant network and hope to win twice by stealing goods from retailers and profiting from the additional cash back. Using ThreatMetrix device identification Ebates discovered offshore fraudsters were signing-up through compromised computers, typically infected PCs of home broadband users in the United States in order to hide their real location. In one example, ThreatMetrix was able to prove that a single fraudster was responsible for creating 23 different accounts using fake email addresses and spoofed IP addresses based on a common device fingerprint.
Johnson says “of course we never want to issue cash back on a fraudulent purchase but even more important is the need to protect our retail partners. The best way to do this is to prevent fraudsters from registering with Ebates in the first place.”
Get the full story on how device identification helps Ebates protect their customers and their merchant partners.
- Tom
