That's another aspect, yes. However, I cannot find any reliable information indicating that his code overwrote cookies from other sites. Lacking that, it is at best speculation that this is what happened. The only way that he 'stole money' from other affiliates is if his code deleted, overwrote, or in some other way usurped other sites' cookies. If you can provide evidence that this is the case, please show it to me, and I will share your indignation.
As icerat said, eBay does take the latest cookies. Dunning's software couldn't detect if an
eBay cookie was placed on a specific computer, so it's not like he could play nice and only place new cookies without overwriting others. The only thing he did was
not place a cookie on computers geolocated to the eBay and Commission Junction area (apparently this helped fool their cookie stuffing detection, and he did that deliberately...).
So again, for those still not sure how it works, here's what would happen and how other eBay affiliates such as myself could be harmed:
- You visit my music site, browse a band that interests you, and click a "buy this album on eBay" link.
- Your PC now has an eBay cookie with the identifier "Morrigan" on it, timestamped at, say, 3 PM today.
- You browse the sellers listing the album you were interested in, and decide to "watch" a particular item, but you don't buy it immediately.
- You visit this band's Myspace page to listen to samples. This Myspace page happens to have the "who links here" widget designed by Dunning.
- This widget has an invisible pixel containing a script that drops an eBay cookie on your PC, with the identifier "Dunning", timestamped at 4 PM today.
- You later decide to place a bid on the album you were watching. You win the auction.
- When processing the sale, eBay checks your cookies, and picks the latest one. The sale is credited to Dunning automatically, even though I'm the one who drove you to eBay.
Now, did a scenario like this happen that often? How many users who unknowingly loaded that pixel had previously clicked an eBay link anywhere else? It's difficult to say exactly (maybe eBay or CJ could dig up the stats, if they kept track of this), but it's definitely greater than zero, considering the sheer amount of false traffic he "drove". And, even if
all those users hadn't previously clicked eBay links from sites like mine, they still went to eBay on their own and not through Dunning's marketing, obviously, so he shouldn't be entitled to any commission.
Maybe Dunning didn't realize he was potentially depriving other affiliates of commissions and thought he was only defrauding eBay, and thus that made it "okay" or "gray" since hey, eBay is a billion-dollar company (of course that doesn't make it okay at all, but you get the idea). Maybe now he realizes it and he feels terrible. I don't know. Personally, though, I have little to no sympathy for him. I understand those who do, but to me this is like stealing from your neighbour just because they were "too stupid" to lock their doors.
Also, since we are skeptics, this resonates with us, so
think about this:
How do we feel about people who charge, say, $700 for a reading to speak to someone's deceased mother?
They were stupid enough to give us that money and we just exploited their weakness. Right?
Do you use Ebay? You may already have "donated."
Well, I should point out that the eBay users (buyers) haven't lost a cent in this. They are not the victims. The victims of Dunning's fraud are eBay themselves, and other (competing) affiliates such as myself or icerat. As a normal user you were not affected and didn't lose money.
So... how do I make sure I don't have those types of tracking cookies on my system? I assume they are a bit harder to get rid of than simply wiping my history or the easy to get at cookies (by way of CCleaner for example).
They are probably not difficult to wipe. You could always de-activate all third party cookies if you want to be sure to never indirectly and unknowingly contribute to cookie stuffing fraud, but you might have issues with other sites. I wouldn't consider it worth the trouble, personally.
Wait, did he use the Skeptoid site for this? Wow...
No, Skeptoid had nothing to do with his fraud as far as I know. Unless he placed that invisible pixel on the Skeptoid site too...
