Although it is difficult to determine if a direct relationship exists between spammers and the brands their campaigns are representing or “linked” to, an obvious hint resides in their ads and their “re-targeting”.
While the lead generator (aka adnetwork) is often tied to affiliate marketing platforms that connect advertisers (sellers) with online publishers (purchasers), they have spawned entire industries in and around themselves, including Anti-Spam, Anti-Phishing, and expanding Ad-Blocking services.
After the spam blast, the response leads generated by these “advertising networks” may be sold and aggregated together in packages for several hundred dollars or more. Often, leads may be funneled to more than one “platform” at a time and “cleaned” to assure the spammer has accurate information and developing demographics.
IAB created a standard taxonomy to target groups for legitimate companies to use. While there are obvious holes, it allows the retargeting of ad traffic, the appearance of an item, and the reappearance of the item in perpetuity. Affiliate marketers only make money if the prospective purchasers they refer actually enroll or buy, and in the latter scenario the payouts may be less frequent but they can be worth thousands of dollars more. One program offers a commission of $40,000.
Affiliate marketing is vast and complex, and while the good players are relatively well known, their “services” waste tremendous amounts of bandwidth and CPU cycles and cause workplace distractions, and it is the spam versions of them that cause more trouble than they are worth.
The types of people that hack websites or breach networks are likely the same ones developing spam automation methods to help unethical affiliate marketers profit. These actors should be avoided at all costs. Avoidance starts with a good web filtering solution so their spam is not ever served in the first place.