This week lead-gen and continuity scheme scams hit the big time with influential blogs TechCrunch and Silicon Alley Insider running major posts on the subject, and Facebook, MySpace, Offerpal and Zynga scrambling to put a good face on it all. And then Dennis Yu confessed to a shady past which upset certain high-earning affiliates no end.

How to Spam Facebook Like a Pro

The TechCrunch article created something of a firestorm (sample comment: “In a nutshell, the offers that monetize the best are the ones that scam/trick users.”) which was fanned the next day by one of our favorite affiliate marketing bloggers, Dennis Yu of Blitz-Local. He guest posted a piece on TechCrunch called “How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insider’s Confession” in which he talked about publishers accessing personal user data and showing it on landing pages, cloaking pages so that Facebook employees couldn’t see them and being threatened with violence by the CEO of a top 25 ad network. Key graf:

There was no way that Facebook—and definitely not the Federal Trade Commission—could keep up with the “innovation” happening. Witness the virtual currency scam, where users complete the offers mentioned above to earn points in a game. It doesn’t take a genius to know that the quality of such leads is garbage—these users are filling out forms just to get the points.

Dennis admits he posted on TechCrunch to hustle for business, and he was inviting a negative reception from certain sections of the affiliate marketing community. Another of our blog-faves, Barman, made his feelings known with enthusiasm at ppc.bz.

Tags: Facebook Scams, Facebook Spam, Facebook Spamming Revealed, Lead-Gen Scams, TechCrunch