The second part of our exclusive interview with Florin Simovici is now available. In this compelling continuation of our Champion of Performance Marketing series, we explore the growing problem of affiliate fraud, particularly in cash-on-delivery programs where some affiliates have found clever ways to double-dip across networks.
Florin reveals how sophisticated fraudsters have engineered methods to double-dip across networks, creating a silent crisis for legitimate marketers and networks alike.
For anyone serious about performance marketing integrity, this rare glimpse into the industry’s shadows provides essential knowledge for protecting your business and optimizing your legitimate marketing efforts.
Check the Episode on Spotify here:
Q: What problems do you see between affiliates and affiliate networks, and vice versa? Do affiliate networks have problems with affiliates?
Florin Simovici: The biggest problem I see for affiliate networks, and I think this has been the biggest problem forever since I was an affiliate, is affiliate fraud – fraud leads, fraud conversions, fraud clicks, everything related to fraud. There are people making a living through these methods. They scam networks every chance they get.
Now, especially in the cash-on-delivery world, I’m seeing a trend. Cash-on-delivery affiliate programs and networks let affiliates manage their data.
They accept orders via API for different products, and affiliates can keep that data and remarket it later through email lists, WhatsApp messages, or whatever.
What some affiliates do, not all, is use the same data and send it to all the networks they work with. They do this because networks are promoting similar products from different advertisers. So, the networks all pay them for this lead because most pay on confirmation. A call center will call the client to confirm.
Even if the client is called multiple times by different call centers, they might say, “I already confirmed this order.” The phone operator might think, “Maybe he forgot,” and mark it as confirmed.
Therefore, the network that dispatches the product quickly receives payment, while all others fall victim to scams. I’ve seen cases where my clients lost quite essential amounts of money, and that’s their most significant issue right now.
Again, this issue has existed since I was in the field, but it keeps evolving. They find new ideas and new ways of cheating networks. It’s a shame because it’s destroying the industry and its image.
Not everybody is like that, but 10% to 15% are doing this. It can be generalized, and people say bad things about affiliates.
Q: As a software provider, do you do something to prevent that? How do you help the networks?
Florin Simovici: First, we don’t analyze the stats unless clients ask us to.
It’s their data, we don’t own it or touch it. When I often speak with clients, they’ll mention their sales figures, but I don’t look at that information. I’m not interested – it’s their business. But if they ask me to look for an affiliate fraud pattern, we can analyze and improve our anti-fraud system.
This particular method I described is difficult to prevent. It’s easier to prevent when orders come from the same network.
We have an affiliate fraud filter where even if the same customer places orders for different products from the same network, we show this to the admin so they can analyze if it’s an affiliate fraud attempt or just a customer interested in multiple products.
To prevent cases where affiliates remarket the same data repeatedly across networks, the only solution is to combine data from all our clients into one unique anti-fraud solution that communicates with all platforms.
That’s what we’re working on now. It’s difficult because we also need client agreement to process this data. Many don’t want to share because they fear losing control of their data.
We explain that it’s not public, it’s only for internal use to create a better anti-fraud solution for their benefit. However, many clients still refuse because they fear we might sell their data.
As a company based in Europe, you’re more protected than working with a SaaS provider based in the USA because we have strict laws and regulations in Europe.
CPV Lab offers the self-hosted option for the same reason, clients want to keep data on their servers.
Florin Simovici: We don’t give the self-hosted possibility because our platform is a vast machine. If a client wants to buy all the software, that’s a different discussion. We can sell it, install it, provide training, and give them updates for a year. This happens maybe once or twice a year when a big company approaches us.
But we don’t offer self-hosting options because it’s harder to maintain.
We offer a cloud solution; if it’s on their server, we can’t guarantee uptime anymore. If a network goes down while an affiliate manages campaigns, they could lose hundreds or thousands of euros in just one hour.
We have networks doing over 10 million in monthly revenue, so imagine what they’d lose if their server were down for an hour or two.
That’s why we prefer not to offer this – it’s a liability we don’t want. We can’t make promises or control their environment. When we control the environment, we can promise a 99.9% uptime minimum. To be honest, we’ve never dropped below 99.98%. Someone constantly monitors those servers 24/7, with alarms if something happens. Usually, my associate Francesco gets woken up in the middle of the night.
Let’s not even discuss DDoS attacks and other attacks from competitors targeting our clients and infrastructure.
At the beginning, we had a big problem with this in Italy – we were receiving giant attacks that seemed almost like government-level technology.
Now, they’ve stopped because we’ve improved our technology, and servers aren’t as easy to attack anymore. They’re more powerful with AI and other advances. We’ll see if someone invents an AI that specifically attacks systems.
Q: You’re mentioning AI. How do you use AI in Traffic Manager? How do you use it in the company or in the tool itself?
Florin Simovici: When ChatGPT first came out, I tested it and asked the team to integrate it for development. In the beginning, I had massive resistance from the whole team, including my associate Francesco, who thought we were losing too much time and that AI needed to learn. But I really pushed for it.
Two or three months later, we started our development. Even now, we’re using AI daily, and all the programmers on our team use it.
It’s helping to increase production by maybe 50% and reducing errors by 90% or even more. Simple errors, before, you could leave a comma randomly in your code or forget to close something. Now, it’s already written error-free most of the time. Sometimes, you need to ask again or train it better.
Also, for documentation. If you’re researching something, it’s just a few clicks away.
Give your clients what they’re looking for, not what you think they need, but what they actually need. In my opinion, the biggest problem media buyers have is that they don’t conduct sufficient A/B testing before launching. We organize masterminds at the Affiliate Expo, and I’m really proud we had this idea.
We called friends to help us, big media buyers spending millions a month on Facebook, successfully managing different campaigns. One of them is Emil, a dear friend who never asks for payment. He always shares his knowledge. He’s making a lot of money, which doesn’t stop him from teaching others how to make money. I really appreciate it.
This year, we’ll be back with Emil, and also Saib for Google. We’ll also cover TikTok with experts who are successfully running campaigns there.
To summarize the lessons from all of them, you either don’t A/B test enough or are not patient enough to analyze data before drawing conclusions. You might often have a small mistake in the landing page, a wrongly placed button that kills your conversion rate, or even server errors when testing.
All this needs to be well organized. You should have a checklist when doing A/B testing. Find the right angle for the customer. Regardless of the product, if you find the right angle, customers will come. Forget about optimizing audiences – with AI today, Facebook and Google do that automatically. Find the angle.
Q: Nice advice. Do you think AI could help with these angles?
Florin Simovici: Of course. It helps with research.
I remember some time ago when I was doing media buying, there was a product working very well, an auto tanning cream for women. A media buyer friend of mine told me his approach: “I go to all the forums and Facebook groups for women and look at all the posts regarding auto tan creams to see what problems women encounter. Is it too oily? Doesn’t absorb well enough? Doesn’t tan enough? Too expensive? How much is too expensive?”
He was doing this research manually.
Today, with AI, you don’t have forums anymore, but you have data that AI can grab for you. Just ask the right questions and then A/B test landing pages. You have tools that can build landing pages really fast now. You don’t need to do it in HTML like decades ago.
Q: Do you need some data to see the performance of those landing pages?
Florin Simovici: Of course, you need data and know how to analyze it. You need tracking software that shows you the right data.
Since your audience is mostly media buyers, I’ll share something I found funny.
We have many clients in the casino industry, which, in my opinion, is 20 years behind in affiliate marketing. They don’t know the tools well, especially regarding media buying.
When I was at Sigma a couple of years ago in Dubai, I gave a speech about media buying and influencer marketing.
When I mentioned EPC as a predictive tool to forecast the outcome of a landing page or offer before pushing it live, people looked at me and asked: “What is EPC?” No one in that room knew about it – these were people buying traffic from different sources. They weren’t media buyers; they had agencies buying traffic.
They didn’t know they could use EPC as a predictive tool.
I showed them, and they were surprised. It’s a fantastic metric if you know how to use it. They were only looking at deposits, CPAs, revenues, and returning customers.
But they didn’t know the performance of their landing pages or which would convert better. Without EPC, you can’t even use artificial intelligence or machine learning to optimize your traffic.
You need the right tools, but you also need to use them. You need a service or product that has them or provides guides teaching you how to use metrics and offering educational content. I’m sure you do this as well. We try to teach people how to integrate with other networks and use different tools.
CPV Lab tried, too. Even though the processes are similar, like postback tracking and integrations between networks and trackers, people still ask about specific networks with specific traffic sources.
Florin Simovici: We overcame this problem by noticing many requests in our ticketing system about integrating Traffic Manager with Traffic Manager. I told Francesco, “We need to create an ecosystem where people can import offers with one click and have the postback already integrated by default.”
After we released that, we saw an increase in traffic across all plans, and everyone was happy.
What I dream of is a world where all systems are transparent. If you’re offering the right tools and great support, clients won’t leave you.
They’ll only leave if you have a bad product or poor support.
So why shouldn’t we all create an ecosystem where we integrate with each other with one click and remove the technical complications? It would be great, but we need an association to make that happen. We need to collaborate.
Q: My last question is: what’s one big problem in the affiliate marketing space that you’d like to see solved?
Florin Simovici: Projection.
We see new affiliates coming in with fresh blood, but they project themselves already living the best life—digital nomads in Thailand, Bali, wherever.
However, they may quickly experience a setback due to the difficulty of achieving these goals.
Some people were lucky and found their niche, achieving success in one or two years. But 95-99% of us worked many years to reach a level of independence.
This is the biggest problem.
They come hoping to earn 3,000-5,000 euros per month or even per day, and when they make 500 euros at the end of the month, they say, “This is not for me, this is bullshit.”
No, it’s not bullshit – you just need to learn, be patient, and improve. Visit conferences if you can, speak with people, and join forums and Telegram groups to improve yourself. But don’t expect to be successful after just a few months.
Most of us post from places like Bali or Thailand, and people think, “This person is making a lot of money; I want to be like them.”
You see the results but not the work behind, all the sleepless nights, being in debt, or stressing about paying affiliates without having money. You need the right mindset and to take it slowly.
Q: Are there many struggles in running an affiliate business successfully?
Florin Simovici: With the right mindset, you don’t take success for granted from the beginning. You approach it thinking, “I need to work and focus,” not already imagining the Lamborghini. It won’t happen that way. And by the way, I hate Lamborghinis. I love sports cars, but Lamborghinis no, maybe because affiliates flash them around. Most of those cars you see in Dubai with three or four numbers on the plate are rented, not owned.
A plate with three numbers costs a lot of money in Dubai. Two or one number is practically impossible—just for the royal family. Everyone wants to show off with Rolexes, too. I don’t wear a Rolex. I don’t care about them. I wanted one at a certain point when I couldn’t afford it. Now I can afford it, but I don’t want one anymore.
Q: You’re wiser now. Where can people get in touch with you?
Florin Simovici: Instagram – SimoviciFlorian, all together. That’s the only place where I post a mix between my personal life and business. I won’t mention other platforms because I’m not active on LinkedIn, and I just publish personal stuff on other platforms. So don’t search for me there. And of course, Affiliate Expo for the conference.
You can get in touch with Florin Simovici here:
- Website Traffic Manager
- Instagram SimoviciFlorian
- For the conference Affiliate Expo
I’m looking forward to it and hope many of you will come to see how a value-oriented conference is organized. Our sponsors and exhibitors are directing their efforts toward media buyers. They organize parties, educational programs, and their own events alongside our masterminds. It will be really interesting.
July, Lake Maggiore – there’s no other conference in Europe at that time. It’s not hot because it’s 30-40 kilometers from Switzerland, in the mountains. The temperature will be around 27-30 degrees – perfect for the pool, beach, lake, and staying outdoors. Let’s hope it won’t rain. But even if it does, we have a really luxurious and interesting location.
Conclusion:
The affiliate fraud challenges Florin describes aren’t just theoretical problems, they’re costing networks real money and threatening the reputation of affiliate marketing as a whole.
But between anti-fraud systems that respect privacy concerns, more substantial technical infrastructure, and smarter A/B testing, there’s plenty of reason for optimism.
As Florin puts it, success in this business isn’t about showing off Rolexes or rented Lamborghinis with fancy Dubai license plates. It’s about patience, learning from others, and doing the unglamorous work that happens before those Instagram-worthy moments in Bali.
Florin’s refreshingly honest advice reminds newcomers that most overnight success stories actually required years of behind-the-scenes effort, something worth when you start on this road.
If you missed it, read the first part of Florin Simovici’s interview, and watch the whole interview here or on YouTube
Author: Julia Draghici
Julia is the CEO of CPV Lab and CPV One ad trackers. She has 15+ years experience in the software industry, from development to management. For more than 6 years she is helping marketers get the best out of their marketing campaigns by using a performant ad tracker. Passionate about entrepreneurship, business and performance marketing, Julia loves helping people!
