Some adult Webmaster affiliate programs have lately been used as unwitting Laundromats for child porn membership payments, and they can take steps to prevent that and help authorities nail the perpetrators, Adult Sites Against Child Pornography warned November 13.
And the danger, said executive director Joan Irvine, is that these incidents may cause wrongful accusations against legitimate affiliate programs by law enforcement.
The child porn fighting group will not reveal the names of the affected affiliate programs for security reasons, although Irvine said some well-meaning people often post them on Webmaster message boards without realizing that can compromise ongoing law enforcement investigations and let the actual child porners wiggle off the hook.
But ASACP said their compliance and site review manager investigates reports of suspect sites and passes validated reports to the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, but while tracking the leads he discovered some affiliate programs unaware they were being used for child porn payments.
A child porn operator sends a mass e-mail asking surfers to visit such a site, with the URL on a free host, but the child porn seeker will arrive and be prompted to join by paying at a non-child porn adult Website where the child porn operator is an affiliate, most often without the affiliate program's knowledge, ASACP said.
"The CP seeker is instructed to send the username and password for the adult website to an e-mail address where the CP operator can verify that the CP seeker has joined the
adult Website," ASACP quoted their compliance/review manager, who does not disclose his or her identity for security reasons. "After verification, an e-mail is sent to the CP seeker containing login information to the actual CP Website.”
ASACP will contact affiliate programs to get information on the offending affiliates or to open direct communication between the program and the FBI, with the FBI sometimes asking the affiliate program operators not to de-activate the suspect affiliates until the investigations are completed, Irvine said.
Irvine said ASACP only recently learned that such child porn operators were trying to use such affiliate programs for membership payments, and between working with the FBI on specific situations and various comments ASACP became aware of on some Webmaster message boards, the group decided the time was now to reveal and discuss the problem and possible solutions and protections.
"We've been able to determine the tips to give people, now that that we've learned more about how they're doing it, and we wanted to be certain to share that with the professionals in the industry," she told AVN.com "A lot of people just weren't aware of this. Once we saw it was starting to become a pattern, as we continued investigating these reports, and once we were able to identify the things people can be doing and looking for, we wanted to get this information out to the professional adult site industry."
She said adult Web professionals "would be shocked, be horrified, about this situation. Because everybody's doing so much to follow the laws in spirit and in letter, and doing whatever they can. And the fact that some of these depraved people are using these affiliates can invalidate that effort."
You can protect your affiliate program with these simple steps, ASACP said:
* - Be sure none of your affiliates uses any terms which might suggest child porn.
* - Place a disclaimer on your pay site join page to warn surfers against joining to gain access to other sites.
* - Inform them their credit card, e-mail, and IP address are logged and will be turned over to the FBI for prosecution in the event of any violation.
* - Check your logs for signups that never log in as members.
* - Comply with ASACP Best Practices policy, which you can see on the ASACP Website.
ASACP urges affiliate programs not to post suspect child porn sites on public Webmaster message boards, because the FBI will often ask affiliate programs who report suspect affiliates not to deactivate them until the investigation in question is finished and arrests are made. To report suspect affiliates or any suspect Websites, visit ASACP or the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children on the Web, or contact your local FBI office.
