Caution for Affiliates

Affiliate sales are an important part of revenue generation for many Squidoo Mall members. I have had a recent experience that concerns me very much for you.

An affiliate module of my own on a page, using an iframe, recently had its account number changed somehow. The auction went from showing Amish quilts at auction to showing Brittney Spears memorabilia. At first I thought the auction house had changed, but I checked my identical iframes on other pages and those were fine.

It appears to me that someone knows how to go into iframes and change account numbers to take sales commissions, and if it happens to you, you may never know it unless you check them every single day.

A few months back when Squidoo was flooded with a wave of spammers, following their own links revealed a strategy of changing the adsense codes in people's blogs and websites, and without the page owner knowing it, the adsense revenues would be paid to the scammers. I'm not making this up, someone called the scammbuster found the info, took screenshots, and made this proof known to lensmasters, Google, the authorities and to Squidoo headquarters. I saw their posts myself.

Untended lenses with your own affiliate modules are ripe to be plucked in this way.

It is clearly important for you to 'make your rounds' frequently to check the payout account codes in your affiliate modules to ensure they haven't been changed by someone else.

Since I'm not interested in supporting such thieves, as I manage the Mall Group I will be watching which lenses are old and stale and which are maintained and reasonably fresh. I will not permit the Mall on Squidoo to become a magnet for such thieves, and neglected lenses are all too easy a target.

I will be adding a 'what's fresh' module to the group page as a means for me to monitor who's lenses have been freshened recently, and which ones are being neglected.

For the protection of every lensmaster in the group, I will be culling old and neglected lenses, whether they have independent affiliate modules or not. I can't count on my being able to tell the difference.