While good affiliates can make you money there are some that can cost you a lot so beware of affiliate theft and fraud that are increasing day by day. Merchants more then ever need to monitor the actions of their affiliates to defend themselves against fraud and prevent them from stealing your income. As long as you do your online business you to need to be cautious to save your hard earned money.

You must be aware of what type of frauds your affiliates may be capable of and then determine what type of preventive measure could be taken to arm yourself. You need to perform careful screening of all your affiliates because you may have hundreds or even thousands of people signing up for your affiliate program and all they could not be honest and serious. There may be frivolous hobbyists, spammers and sophisticated con artists which require to be weeded so that you are left with serious marketers to work with.

The different types of frauds your affiliates may be capable of are Spammers, Malware, Fraudulent and Fake Transactions and Typo squatting. Spammers are those affiliates who involve themselves sending unsolicited e-mails featuring a net marketer's product and also create difficult situations for the legitimate e-mailers to separate themselves. Some affiliates even use adware specifically designed that is unknowingly installed on a person's computer to steal traffic from legitimate affiliates by replacing their links with new ones. The result is that the legitimate affiliates do not get their fees for their work and they keep on going with their work and when they come to know about it they had already made a hair tearing loss! Fraudulent and Fake Transactions are performed by the online fraudsters by signing up as affiliates making large purchases employing a stolen credit card or may opt for creating scripts to generate phony clicks, leads, or transactions.

Typo squatting is another way against which you should keep yourself well armed. It is also known as URL hijacking. Person involved in such illegal job are called Typo squatters who manipulates the URL the website address of affiliate program. They register several variations of a high traffic domain names and then sign up for that same merchants affiliate program to sell them which brings them the revenue which is rightly the earnings of the owner of the affiliate programs.

Once you are aware of the types of frauds and armed with certain screening tips like checking out for anyone inactive website of the affiliates that mark them as spammers, the optimized content that must relate to your products and services and the measure of loyalty to follow the policies surrounding the use of content from your site you are sure to safe from being cheated.