First Principle

These media companies, Cyhawk in this case, are sometimes very convoluted structures and approach buyers with different names and websites.

The spam we were discussing could have been bought from any number of companies that belong to cyhawk, and we don’t even know that cyhawk is on top of the pile.

That means golden casino and fortune and others could have gone to adtech and purchased campaigns from any number of legit looking advertising companies. These campaigns are generally paid in advance.

By the time they see that it’s actually spam that brings the players in and not the venue they paid for, all those mails paid for are in queue and will play out.

More often than not the casinos are duped, this is a very shady niche. They do have to advertise though, so it’s important to point out the spam to them, but they are not usually responsible for it directly. All they can do is discontinue the campaign and most of the time when we post, that happens.

Now, how exactly these media companies harvest information about players is the question.

Likely they do have sites that register your IP and look that up. And likely they have ways that we don’t know about.

If we actually want to make a difference in the amount of spam sent, this is what needs to be investigated. A bunch of shady companies like cyhawk (think about the name!) are out there collecting info and creating legit looking media sales companies and making good money.

They pretend to get the players through PPC campaigns, their own websites (they usually have gambling sites), other types of sites with proper demographics, or to have contracts with excisiting sites to buy all their traffic.

They say they do most anything – but never spam.

Some also sell email campaigns, and these can also be legit if they have collected opt in emails from sites they operate.

So that’s why I am hesitant to blame the casinos. I too have been approached by places who want to buy my traffic or sell me traffic. I have seen groups of webpages that were created solely to generate players for these media companies. I should have kept the info in retrospect, but it’s all long deleted. I just happened to still have the cyhawk info.

The legitimate ad agencies do help the casinos be more profitable, and in many cases, us by creating a better budget for aff programs. So the casinos are not going to stop using advertising companies, even though they get burned by spammers and otherwise shady places. The advertising companies send a significant number of players, depending on the casinos probably rivaling or superceeding what we affs send. Fighting the industry is useless.

Identifying the ones that have shady practices and informing the casinos is useful in keeping things clean.

Next time there is an adtech conference near you, consider going and collecting info. Maybe we can identify a bunch of the shady ones.

The legit thing jottix does is buy banner space on your sites. You can get flat rate or CPA or if you negotiate probably a % of all the players you send to their site that convert. (You’d have to trust them for that, lol). It’s a similair concept to b4. These type deals have existed for a long time.

In the case of harvesting addies and IPs and such, I just don’t know how all they do it. It’s their trade secret, if everyone knew, they’d lose their niche.

Perhaps one way is message boards, I find a lot of user profiles from many boards in google.