Affiliate Marketing's Dirty Little Secret
Cookie stuffing, free trials that never ended, and the checkout pages that sold your card number. By the end of 2010, the secret was a federal case.
Every industry has the thing everyone knows and nobody prints. In affiliate marketing in 2010 it was this: a lot of the money was not earned. It was taken.
Three practices carried most of the weight.
Cookie stuffing
An affiliate gets paid when a shopper buys after clicking his link. Cookie stuffing skips the click. The affiliate quietly drops his tracking cookie on your browser, and when you later buy on your own, he collects. eBay sued over exactly this in 2008, and in June 2010 a federal grand jury indicted Shawn Hogan and Brian Dunning for wire fraud. eBay had paid Hogan more than $28 million in commissions. Dunning pleaded guilty in 2013 and got 15 months. Hogan pleaded guilty and in 2014 was sentenced to five months in prison and a $25,000 fine.
The free trial that never ended
The "free" bottle of acai or teeth whitener that came with a monthly charge buried in the fine print. In August 2010 the FTC sued Central Coast Nutraceuticals, a Phoenix company, over free-trial offers for Acai Pure and Colotox, alleging fake celebrity endorsements and repeated unauthorized charges. The 2012 settlement suspended an $80 million judgment and banned the defendants from negative-option sales, without any admission of wrongdoing.
The checkout that sold you
The quietest one. You buy a movie ticket, and a "thank you" offer on the confirmation page enrolls you in a membership club using the card number you just typed in for something else. A Senate Commerce investigation found companies including Affinion, Vertrue and Webloyalty took more than $1 billion this way, through hundreds of retail sites that passed along customers' billing data.
How it aged
Congress acted fast for once. The Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act was introduced in May 2010 and signed on December 29, 2010. It banned passing card data to third-party sellers after a purchase and required clear consent for negative-option offers. It is still the FTC's main weapon, and the agency used it against Uber in 2025 even after a federal appeals court vacated the broader click-to-cancel rule that July.
The secret is out. The practices are not gone. They just pay better lawyers.
This page rebuilds an April 2010 IndustryPace post whose original text is not available. Facts come from DOJ releases, FTC filings, the Senate Commerce Committee's 2010 investigation and public court records; settlements cited involved no admission of wrongdoing. The author co-founded LeadsCon and has worked in lead generation for about 20 years.