I was reading the thread about "Stolen Commissions" in another part of this forum and it reminded me of a PayPal issue I came upon a while back. I had read about a woman who had created an e-book and was selling it off her site through PayPal...so far so good. Except, she was wondering why she was only getting pennies for her product rather than the full amount. She posted this query on a forum and it was revealed that her source code from PayPal was not encrypted. Therefore anyone, with a little thought, could view her source code, copy it to a HTML editor and replace the dollar amount of the product with whatever...in her case 2cents. Then all they had to do was to open the revised source code in a new browser window and continue on with the new price. I thought "WOW, that's pretty f***ed up". So I went on a friend's site who was also selling products through PayPal and sure enough I was able to replicate what had happened to the woman. I immediately informed my friend and he corrected it by choosing the encryption option through PayPal.
A few weeks later I was checking out Jeremy Palmer's site. If you are unaware, Jeremy is considered a Super Affiliate and has made some serious mad money using PPC. As I was checking out his e-book page I viewed his source code and found that his PayPal code was not encrypted either. I was quite surprised and emailed Jeremy right away with what I found and how he could resolve it. The next day I received a very nice email from Jeremy and he sent me his e-book as a thank you. I have never bought an e-book before and while most of the info in his book I was already aware of, there was substantial info on PPC and Keyword tracking and so on which I was not aware of. Mind you PPC is not my game so I won't be putting any of that into use, but it was nice of him to thank me that way. By the way, Jeremy has stopped selling his e-book which is explained on his site. Maybe the book will become a "collectors item"...
Anyhoo...all this to say that if you plan on using PayPal make sure you choose the encryption format. Better safe than broke...
Take care all.
Pay Pal and Encryption
Linear Mode
