Shawn Hogan Speaks Out: Marketer Charged by Feds Claims Conspiracy
eBay's biggest affiliate said eBay knew what he was doing. He still pleaded guilty. Both things can be true.
In June 2010, a federal grand jury in San Jose indicted Shawn Hogan, founder of Digital Point Solutions, for wire fraud. The government said he cookie-stuffed eBay's affiliate program, dropping tracking cookies on people who never clicked his links and collecting commissions on their purchases. The indictment alleged more than $15.5 million for the period it covered. Court papers elsewhere put his total eBay commissions at about $28 million. Brian Dunning was indicted alongside him.
What Hogan said
That summer Hogan went public with a different story. As BrandVerity summarized it in August 2010, he said eBay's own program managers pushed him toward gray-area tactics and helped him stay clear of the company's compliance staff. In 2013 he and Dunning told Business Insider they had told the FBI that eBay knew, and Hogan described a Las Vegas dinner where eBay staff allegedly discussed a "black budget." Business Insider noted nothing in the court file backed that up, and Hogan also said he alone was responsible for what he did.
How it ended
Hogan pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in December 2012. In May 2014 he was sentenced to five months in prison, three years of supervised release and a $25,000 fine. He said a plea cost less than a trial after years of legal bills. Dunning pleaded guilty in April 2013 and got 15 months.
How it aged
It remains the landmark criminal cookie-stuffing case, and it came up again in 2024 and 2025 coverage of the PayPal Honey extension. The uncomfortable part of Hogan's story never went away either. When the merchant's own affiliate managers are paid on volume, the merchant is not a pure victim of the fraud that produces the volume. That was true in 2010, and it describes half of programmatic advertising today.
This page rebuilds an August 2010 IndustryPace post, cited by BrandVerity, whose original text is not available. Facts come from the federal indictment and sentencing as reported by Ben Edelman's affiliate litigation index, MarTech, Business Insider and BrandVerity. Hogan's claims about eBay are his own and were not supported by the court file.