Interesting idea, how would a casino police that?
They sign up to T&Cs that say they won't do these things. Then some of them do.
When they do we block them.
How would you propose they are vetted?
Cheers
Andy
32Red seem to manage it.
When I signed up to 32Red affiliate program years ago, it was a 2 stage process. I had to submit the URL of the site I was intending to use, and there was a delay whilst the application was vetted before I had access to any banners etc. I presumed at the time that the intended site was reviewed for it's current content by a human, rather than a computer, and that some background checks were made.
Affiliate programs surely have to ID their affiliates to the same thorough extent faced by players, as after all, money is involved and laundering has to be prevented. This should make it harder for known spammers to keep on coming back for another go.
If they slip past these checks, robust policing is needed, the same robustness players face when using a bonus. Even if a player makes an unintentional mistake, they do not usually get to keep the winnings they made from it, but DO get to keep any losses. Applying this to affiliates would be a good start, too many reps say an offending affiliate gets a "talking to", but presumably gets to keep what they have gained through spam.
There are plenty of received emails that whilst it could be argued they are not spam, the content itself is misleading and "spammy" in nature, and this itself should be sanctioned as a separate breach. The rules for spam should be that where a complaint is received, the affiliate has to demonstrate that the recipient opted in to receive that specific series of mailers. If they can't manage this, then it should be deemed as spam by definition. This will prevent the use of traded lists where the affiliate can claim they are not responsible because they "bought a mailing list in good faith". Broken unsubscribes on mailers should also be sanctioned as a breach, as should any kind of spoofing or hacking of headers in order to disguise the source.
If the sanctions are tough enough, word will get around the "black hat" community that it isn't cost effective to misuse that particular affiliate program, and the result would be fewer instances of spam.
As well as all of this, there should also be checks for "irregular marketing" that will flag affiliate accounts for further checks if they seem to have many more hits than would be expected from an honestly run account using the websites they have declared in their application.
Use of "spamtrap" email addresses would also help detect affiliates who spam.
The technical staff within the program have the advantage in knowing exactly how traffic is tagged, and so should be able to see through the various tag hiding schemes now being employed by rogue affiliates.
Where spammers are spoofing the sender to make it look like it's the casino, it leads to the possibility that the casino's own mail servers will end up on some of the spam prevention blacklists, which will disrupt their communications with existing customers.