Five CPA Scam Networks to Avoid at All Cost

You can make a lot of money with CPA ads. When one lead for one offer can generate $100 or more, and you have a ready source of tens of thousands of interested people, you can make absolute bank.

That is, right up until the CPA network finds some excuse not to pay you. This happens all too frequently in the world of CPA, and it’s a serious problem affecting new marketers. When you don’t know any better, one attractive network can screw you out of thousands of dollars.

Oh, rarely will the network disappear with your money. They won’t be so blatant. Instead, they’ll find some excuse, some rule you violated, and present you with the violation in lieu of a real customer service response. As far as they’re concerned, the money you earned wasn’t legitimately earned. It’s theirs to keep. Of course, you’re new to CPA marketing and don’t have the legal or financial resources available to take action.

This gets even worse if the traffic you drive to your offers came through PPC. You’re paying for the traffic, and you’re getting conversions, which you expect will cover the cost of the ads and profit. When you find out those conversions didn’t count, you’re in the hole for your ads and you have no profit to cover them. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Thankfully, if you do your research, you can identify the worst of these scam networks and avoid them. What follows is a list of networks and tactics to watch out for, along with some tips on researching and judging any network you come across. Never take a network at face value; scammers lie.

Feed Flare Media

Feed Flare was notorious for changing up their minimum payment and for not paying people, or for declaring leads to be invalid. It was painful all around to try to contact their support, and their owner made excuses for advertisers while refusing to relay direct complaints. Their AffPaying profile accumulated a long trail of negative reviews before the network faded into obscurity. If you come across any network with a similar pattern - sudden rule changes, invalidated leads, and unresponsive support - treat it as a major red flag when getting accepted into a private CPA network.

EWA Network

EWA was a textbook case of PR-managed fraud. Every few months, they would send out placating messages, announce the firing of some internal figure, or talk up a reorganization meant to clean house. It never stuck. A few months later, EWA would just stop paying again. Networks that respond to fraud accusations with press releases rather than actual payments are almost always buying time, not fixing problems.

1GreatCPA

Anyone advertising themselves as great is either full of themselves or lying. This one was both. Frequently, they wouldn’t pay, or if they did, they conveniently lost a number of qualified leads to pay less. There were even reports of them sending out tax documents to people they never actually paid, just for that added kick in the pants. Always be wary of a CPA network that spends a lot of time replying to reviews on third-party sites, particularly if they respond aggressively to negative ones while ignoring the positive ones entirely.

1st Class CPA

This network was particularly brazen in how they treated affiliates. They were known to call out their own publishers as illiterate, lazy morons who couldn’t read TOS documents - dense legalese designed specifically to create wiggle room for non-payment. They paid well for affiliates they wanted to keep around, using those relationships to maintain a buffer of positive reviews while quietly scamming lower-volume publishers who lacked the leverage to push back. If you’re exploring alternatives, it’s worth understanding the differences between CPA and affiliate marketing before committing to any network, and knowing other affiliate network options can help you avoid bad actors entirely.

COPEAC

COPEAC finally shut down back in 2012 after literal years of doing essentially no real business. No serious advertiser would work with them, but they still presented offers, maintained a public face, and duped CPA marketers into sending them traffic. They didn’t pay, and no one lasted there for more than a few weeks - but as a trap for newcomers, they were remarkably effective for far too long.

Warnings and Methods for Identifying Scams

So, here’s the thing. Anyone at all, even you, right now, can start an affiliate network. All you need is some web hosting, a software suite for tracking affiliates, and a lot of time. Go out and sign up for 200 CPA networks, register for every offer they have. Now forward the offer to people in your network, and pay them less than you’re being paid for the offer. The referral goes through you and your network.

For example, say Dating Site A pays $50 for a lead. You sign up for that offer and put it on your site, paying $35 for a lead. Some poor newbie CPA marketer signs up for the offer and runs it, and gets ten conversions. That means you have to pay them $350, and you do, and that’s fine. Because you refer the leads to YOUR offer, and you get paid $500 for them. That’s a profit of $150, and you didn’t do the advertising work.

Add on a ton of volume and offers from a ton of affiliates and you have a massive moneymaking scheme. Now toss in a little loose bookkeeping - “losing” leads here and there, or disqualifying some perfectly legitimate leads but counting them for yourself - and you have a lot of money you’re scamming out of people.

Now look at it from the CPA marketer newbie’s perspective. They see a network that accepts anyone, and decent $35 offers. They sign up, they run them, they get paid, though maybe some of their leads go missing. They never know that a better network around the corner - one they can’t get into as a newbie - has the better offers without the middleman. In fact, they never know there’s a middleman.

The scale of this problem is larger than most newcomers realize. Convert2Media, one of the more established networks in the space, once reported that approximately 75% of applications coming into their network were from publishers attempting to fill in their own leads or create ghost leads entirely. That figure speaks to just how saturated the CPA space is with bad actors, and why established networks have become increasingly selective about who they let in.

And fraudulent lead counting is just one of many ways a CPA network can introduce fraud into the proceedings. Cookie stuffing, click fraud, and outright account termination after a big payout are all documented tactics used by bad networks to avoid paying what they owe.

Whenever you’re investigating a new network, search for it on review aggregators and affiliate marketing forums like affLIFT or STM Forum. Pay special attention to negative reviews, but read them critically - some users really will be breaking the rules and complaining about not being paid. Others will be legitimate victims. Look for patterns: multiple people reporting the same issue, such as leads disappearing at scale or support going silent around payment dates, is a much stronger signal than a single disgruntled post.

The single best protection against CPA scam networks is building a reputation within the industry first. The networks worth working with - the ones with better offers, faster payments, and honest tracking - are typically invite-only or require a referral. Getting there takes time, but it’s far better than burning ad spend on a network that was never going to pay you.