Exploring Risk and Fraud Scenarios in Affiliate Marketing Technologies from the Advertisers perspective

Affiliate Marketing (AM) has become an important and cost effective tool for e-commerce. There are numerous risks and vulnerabilities that are typically associated with AM. Though a well-planned AM model can greatly benefit the e-commerce strategies of an enterprise, a haphazardly implemented system can expose a business enterprise to major risks and vulnerabilities, which can lead to great financial losses through fraudulent activities. This research-in-progress has identified some of the risks and the technical background of those scenarios. The research will now move on to build a functional prototype of an AM network to design and test solutions to control the identified risks.