Wikipedia's affiliate marketing entry includes the following sentence: "Although many affiliate programs have terms of service that contain rules against spam, this marketing method has historically proven to attract abuse from spammers."

This is very true — affiliate marketing methods definitely attract abuse from spammers.

Our recent posts on Facebook and YouTube spam linked to cost per action (CPA) affiliate networks. We've come across affiliates from several CPA incentive networks while investigating social networking spam, and one of the more interesting companies that we frequently see abused is CPAlead.com.

CPAlead claims to be to be one of the largest affiliate networks with nearly 11 thousand members in its Facebook Group. They also have an interesting Twitter profile that lists their daily top earners.

They've tweeted 258 times since June 18th and the total amount of daily top earnings is $485,188.34.



There were 281+ thousand leads (completed surveys) and 3.7+ million clicks. That's a 7.5% conversion rate for the top earners.

With numbers such as that… there's little wonder why spammers are attracted.