eBay is once again making waves in the affiliate community with the most recent tidal wave of deciet crashing on the shores of Shawn Hogan. You may know Shawn Hogan as the owner and operator of the shadowy webmaster forum DigitalPoint which boasts a dazzling array of con-artists, schemers and scammers from all over the globe. It seems Mr. Hogan himself now stands accused of taking part in an elaborate scheme to defraud eBay’s affiliate programs whilst the program was under Commission Junction’s watch. Could it be possible that there is a link between the recent class action lawsuit against Commission Junction? Could it be that a band of rouge black hat webmasters and affiliates were operating out of DigitalPoint forums and they devised a sinister plan to rip off other affiliates while ripping off the auction giant eBay?
Here’s a sampling of the buzz from around the blogosphere.
As far as I can tell, the story originated from Charles G. Mullen’s blog and he was the one who also started the thread at Shawn’s own DigitalPoint forums. Charles’ blog cited this site with a pdf file of the court documents.
Monty’s Mega Marketing hit the front of Sphinn with a regurgitation of the factual elements of the story.
The ever eloquent Linda Buquet of 5 Star Affiliate Marketing blogs added one of the most significant entries in the Shawn Hogan cookie stuffing saga with an exceptional post that takes the cheated affiliate’s perspective against the black hatters who are creating havoc in the affiliate marketing industry.
Further on the line, Zooped.com tagged the story with some heavy handed keywords such as low life, piece of sh!t, scamer, scammer, Shawn Hogan, theif. Wow, somebody else must have been banned at DigitalPoint :-) (thanks again Shoemoney)
According to Justia Federal District Court Filings and Dockets (the most reliable source I could find), the suit was filed on August 25, 2008 and a summons was issued to defendants Shawn Hogan, Brian Dunning and Kevin Dunning on August 26, 2008.
One of the defendants in the case, Brian Dunning has appeared on CNN when he was the CTO of Buylink Corporation. His website claims “I participate at whatever level you require. I’ve done everything from providing $7.5 million in venture capital, to hiring the right exec team, to sitting down and personally coding; and everything in between.”
Suprising, there’s not mention of cookie stuffing found in his resume :-)
The initial court filing claims that DigitalPoint Solutions had developed software that not only stuffed visitors browsers with eBay cookies but that they knew what they were doing was illegal because they coded the software never to stuff the same visitor’s browser more than one time to avoid detection. DPS accomplished their cookie stuffing by using a code generated image that did the dirty work before sending the image headers and displaying the 1×1 pixel image. The use of iFrames which is a traditional method for accomplishing cookie stuffing was avoided as to not arouse suspicion from eBay and Commission Junction.
Clearly this all shows a knowledgable intent to defraud eBay and Commission Junction, not to mention to steal other affiliates commissions from right under their noses.
On the funny side, here’s some of the most hilarious comments from the DigitalPoint and other threads…
joh1 - Shawn and others who took part in this, if you all did this; you all have my respect.
Tobidotman - People told me this forum was garbage, but it’s good to me, but i don’t want to be associated with a thief, yet i don’t know the full story.
edenz - Hats off…. Shawn.. Today I have become one of yours fan. I hope we could meet one day.
timsdd - maybe you could bake him a cake with a saw in it
kristeejo (at V7n)- bet they won’t have cookies like that in the ebay prison. hey - if he goes to prison wonder if ebay will let us bid on his bond?
Regardless of these two other defendants and Shawn Hogan’s efforts to stuff affiliate cookies, it is my belief that the true responsibility for tracking affiliate commissions lies with not only the affiliate management network but the actual merchant themselves. I can’t believe that eBay would be so slack that they never bothered to question commissions they paid out until now. Could it be that eBay is experiencing financial turmoil and they are clutching at straws to make ends meet? The recent events surrounding the eBay/EPN “night of the long knives” affiliate termination saga certainly paint a disturbing picture for eBay’s future.
eBay’s stock has plummeted from a 52 week high of 40.73 to barely keeping head above the 20 per share mark. That’s a decline by almost half of their value and they are keeping pace with Google to become one of the biggest tech stock disasters since the dot com bust sank many a fortune in a sea of sorrow back in the late 1990’s. If eBay were riding high like they were two years ago, they might overlook something as boring as cookie stuffing affiliates but today, eBay is out for nickles and dimes and they have shown they are ready to unleash their lawyers on black hat punks far and wide.
I think Shawn bit off a little more than he could chew, this time. It will be interesting to see how this thing develops going forward. Nice blog, by the way.
I can’t believe Shawn would do something like this when his is already a millionaire from DP forums alone.
I am part of the CJ class action suit and I too wonder if this is part of what is happening right now against CJ. I had a feeling it was due to ebay because of the way they jumped ship to Pepperjam.
Does this mean we can all sue Shawn Hogan?
I hope they lock him up and throw away the key. He is a criminal and deserves to get treated like the thief he is.
Do you think Shoemoney and Aaron Nimocks were in on this cookie stuffing business? They are both mods at DP and they both have messed with ebay affiliate.
Is this guy crazy? He owns one of the biggest forum on the internet and he has to scam?
WTF???
I try to stay away from the trashy forums. I think originally they were set up to allow people to help each other out in highly specified areas and now they have turned into marketing engines that usually rip new internet marketers off by selling them junk they do not need. There are very few high quality forums left and I have to say I am glad to see some class action going on with these cons!
It is not a good idea to cheat. Cheaters steal money from honest affiliates pockets as they work to send traffic to any program and they will not get credit for the sales becausae hackers stole it.
Also, a lot of the site hacking that has been going on lately which has ruined honest websites comes from cookie stuffers and black hat people.
Shame on you.
I won’t even begin to comment on Shawn’s guilt or innocence because I don’t know the whole story behind the story.
I just wish Shawn would take a more active role in DP. DP helped make Shawn what he is today, but it seems he could care less about what goes on with it anymore.
It’s kinda like suddenly winning $10 million dollars in the lotto and leaving your mom to live in a rundown mobile home with no water or electricity…..
All the comments at the DP thread on how good an idea this was and how black hat is the way to go is just pathetic. DP is filled with garbage. Scammers around every corner. All the scams on DP will be brough up in the courtroom and the theives that steal and corrupt will help be the downfall of their king. What was once a glorious site has slowly been reduced to trash. So everybody jump on the bandwagon and you too can get sued by ebay, isn’t that cool!
It’s a bit shocking to hear that the owner of such a big forum was busted doing this stuff, but surely he knew what he was getting into? Also that he’d more than likely get caught.
He deserves any punishment he gets.
DP are all filled with scammers and the biggest ones are the moderator team with the leader crazy_rob at the top as admin of scamming.
Look on this thread what crazy_rob says :
BOO HOOO HOOO! GTFO and stay out!
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=3799419
“I love to F. with these scammers. They’re so gullible.”
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=197683#17
and then he ban me the other day for speaking my piece on these behaviors.
F..K DP forum. I hope they rot in jail.
The Nazism of power tripping, ban happy mods and crazy_rob admin on DP is notorious throughout the internet. Every webmaster knows that DP is not a safe place to do business. You don’t have to go far for proof, just look at the thread about Shawn Hogan getting busted.
I don’t like scammers and thieves. I will never be part of a forum owned by a scammer thief like Shawn Hogan.
Let’s see how fast I can get my DP account banned today.
I know Shoemoney was cookie stuffing with Auctionads and I can prove it. I am reporting him to ebay and I hope ebay sues that dork for everything he’s worth.
do you think this lawsuit can turn into a criminal case? Google put click fraud scammers in jail so why can’t the govt make a example of the DP scammers and put them behind bars ?
Isn’t is funny that a forum who is never makes an effort to get rid of real scammers but makes a new rule people (noobs) you get banned for 7 days in the B/S/T section if you post certain things, but here is the owner and creator of the forum scamming aff coms ?? !!!
I am not posting my site link here for fear DP mods will ban me for this comment.
It seems like many people commenting here are disenfranchised with DigitalPoint forums. If you’re looking for a new forum where you are treated with respect and there are no scammers lurking in the shadows , feel free to join me at :
http://www.code4gold.com/forums/
We have a lot of ex-DP members and more are migrating every day. Plus, the admin (me) promises never to stuff cookies on forum members. :-)
When I visited DP yesterday to see what the talk was about I ran a spyware check on my system (I was just about to check my bank details), and lo and behold - I was infected by a high-level spyware program pretending to be an .ico file.
If I did pick it up from DP - Wow. Talk about dirty.
The thread on DP has come to a halt because crazy_rob is banning the accounts of anyone that speaks out against Shawn.
Use these forum threads if you don’t want to get banned by the Nazis at DP
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=568450
http://www.v7n.com/forums/computers-internet/97899-digitalpoint-forum-shawn-hogan-sued-ebay-fraud.html
http://www.code4gold.com/forums/index.php?topic=16127.0
too late. Looks like one of Shawn’s supporters at V7n has silenced that thread also. B!tch Cricket.
Who cares about getting banned at DP? That forum is a wasteland. I was banned two years ago and I never went back. I hope Shawn Hogan and his scammer mods get what they deserve.
Look at the comments on this post at Shoemoney’s site
http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/09/10/google-teams-up-with-ebay-cookie-stuffer-misspellitcom/
Shawn Hogan admits he cookie stuffs and Shoemoney says
—
I agree and I dont think its violating anyones terms of service. In fact I think its a very smart way to plant cookies… maybe that is a better word… cookie planting ?
—
I think shoemoney should be under investigation also because he is Shawn’s right hand man at DP.
Hope all goes well for shawn
To be very true, DP is the biggest piece of shit on this planet and I have been scammed there several times. I could see shoemoney banned there but I didn’t know the reason. I have already said “good bye” to DP and shall recommend others to leave that… It is a scammers forum.
Digital point is a garbage scam site all the administrators and mods are a bunch of scammers. They just sit around and scam noobs with their multiple user accounts. Then when people call them on their scams they are banned and their posts are deleted.
They say they make all this money off of adsense but just go a look how many people get ripped off and scammed everyday that is where the site is making the real money.
Great forum all the members get scammed and ripped off. The traffic is all garbage traffic it is all in the Buy Trade and Sell section just tons of poor scum from India trying to make a buck and all the mods with multiple accounts running scams all trying to cash in on a few noobs wandering through with some money, like 101 vultures to every 1 or 2 noobs, Great traffic.
I hope shawn goes to prison and they shut down DP
simmion, I thought I was the only one who suspected DP mods have several ID’s on the forum. No wonder they are so strict about other people having multiple accounts. Just like thieves are always paranoid everyone else is going to try to rip them off.
It’s not just the mods that have multiple ID’s used to scam, some people who are friends with the mods have obvious multiple ID’s.
I think Aaron Nimocks (who now runs seobum.com) has at least ten ID’s on DP. He got banned from ebay also. Probably for cookie stuffing.
What a bunch of criminals.
Some scammer named Chandan from India scraped one of my sites and was selling the database on DP. I posted in his thread the facts with proof and some unknown mod at DP deleted my post. I reported the stolen content and the missing post in the feedback section and some rude woman moderater named jhmattern who has PMS because she can’t find a boyfriend banned me for saying her friend Chandan stole my content.
Don’t be so quick to make eBay out to be the victim in this scenario. eBay is no stranger to scammers and the management at eBay and Paypal are the biggest white collar criminals the internet has ever known.
Suprise eBay starts pissing and crying about paying some lousy commissions some kids were smart enough to swipe from under their noses. It wasn’t stealing because eBay’s TOS never said cookie stuffing was forbidden.
Wake up. As the author of this article stated at the end, eBay’s stock is down almost by half in the last year and they have just launched attacks against sellers and affiliates. They are the evil ones, not this kid who exploited their system.
well everybody have a secret
go shawn
This is freaking hilarious. I’m about to piss my pants laughing at all the ex-DP members banned members who are ranting like little girls here.
That “Southern Brat” at V7n forums closed and locked the thread about this topic. I wonder if the mods at that forum have been cookie stuffing their forum? What other reason to lock a thread other than to hide guilt ?
I haven’t been there (at DP) very long but what I see is enough to make me go elsewhere. I don’t want to be associated with criminal element or get scammed.
I wonder how much money he actually made from it. It must not have been criminal or the people at the court house must not know what to do with it because it has turned into a civil case.
If I put something on my site that affects your site have a broken the law?
Is it my fault that your program is easily fooled?
I’m not saying what he did was correct, just thinking out loud.
DP is a good forum for sure, strange thing I have always heard of all the scamming but never had it happen to me. Hopefully now I have not jinxed myself and will get scammed soon :-)
Be careful with DP Lee. Nobody ever expects to get scammed until after it happens. Hindsight is 20/20.
Oddly enough..digital point forums are down for me right now..I don’t know if it’s my connection, or they are really just going away??
I must be fairly naive because I didn’t even know what ‘cookie stuffing’ was until about a week or two back when I started reading this stuff.
never new that DP was was a place where spammers and hackers live and thrive on people affiliate programs….lolo…great blog post
All you have to do is take a gander at DP’s B/S/T foldes to figure out what’s going on over there. If you steer clear of doing deals there, you’ll not get scammed.
Anyhoo — Is there any news on the case against Shawn ?
I never go to his forum because there are so many thieves from India lurking to scam you. Now I know the owner is a scammer himself and planting fake cookies for to make money then I will never go again to visit that place.
[…] this "news" was broke almost two months ago here : Shawn Hogan of DigitalPoint Caught With Hand in the eBay Cookie Jar here: eBay Files Lawsuit Against Cookie Stuffers and here : Digital Point’s Shawn Hogan Sued […]
I wasn’t aware digitalpoint was a shadowy forum at all, I thought people left that stuff up to ‘blackhatworld’. Oh well, anyways I lol’d at the
“maybe you could bake him a cake with a saw in it” quote. Although I don’t really know what it means.
Great story. I never know such thing would have happened from DigitalForum because they seem to be legit.
What I wonder is, does this cookie stuffing overwrite the other affiliate’s cookie as well? If it does, then I can see this is very dirty stealing. If it doesn’t, then it’s simply stealing from the rich. Anyway, it’s stealing.
Thanks for the story. I’ve learned something new today ;)