Following on from my last posts about corruption in affiliate marketing I did some more digging. I had a few people push my in the right direction so thanks to them for that, again everything below is just how I see it and is based on things I’ve found online, might be 100% inaccurate.
Well if you remember from my first post the name of the account in TD was AD2Z Internet Marketing. Fair enough so lets have a look for them www.ad2z.com
It’s a fairly simple site that as a merchant id look at and think, yeah okay this affiliates going to do paid search and accept them. But on looking around the site a bit its interesting to see who they link to:
www.wishtotravel.com [whois] [reverse dns]
www.travcompare.com [whois] [reverse dns]
www.hoteldeals.me.uk [whois] [reverse dns]
www.onedeals.com [whois] [reverse dns]
www.funds4me.co.uk [whois] [reverse dns]
www.mythaihome.com [whois] [reverse dns]
www.holidayaffiliates.com [whois] [reverse dns]
and I also know Marcel used to run a blog at: www.marcelellis.com [whois] [reverse dns] but it seems he’s taken that down now.
So they have a nice range of travel sites and 2 cashback sites. I thought id do a whois search on these domains, see who owns them. Now for the .com’s they are all registered through Domains by Proxy, Inc and I cant find anything else out about them. However hoteldeals.me.uk shows as being registered to AD2Z and the address on the whois matches the details in the Affiliate Window account – fairly safe to say then that these sites all belong to the same person. Hang about though, funds4me.co.uk has a slightly strange whois
That’s not AD2Z that’s Robert Moorehouse. Lets just pretend that I don’t know Robert works at Hoseasons… a quick google search on “Robert Moorehouse hoseasons” gives me this site - www.moorehouse.eu
So I’d guess there is possibly some link between funds4me and AD2Z as they both link to each other & both people have worked together – again all purely speculation.
But how does holidayaffiliates.com fit into all this? In all honesty im not sure all I know from the above is that:
Marcel’s site wishtotravel.com features a page for this brand new network
From the reverse DNS lookup a lot of the sites are hosted on the same server, however the holidayaffiliates.com site and marcelellis.com site are hosted together on a separate server in the US.
This is all very fuzzy information I know, and nothing can be conclusively drawn from it but it does raise a few questions.
