Glossary
Cookie stuffing
Setting an affiliate cookie on a visitor's browser without a real click, through a hidden iframe, an image or a script, so that if they later buy from the merchant the affiliate is credited. Fraud in every affiliate program's terms.
Also called: cookie dropping.
E-commerce and software programs pay on a cookie: last click before the purchase wins. Cookie stuffing plants that click on everyone who visits a page, hoping some of them buy anyway. Programs detect it by conversion rates that make no sense and by the absence of real clicks.
It is a classic of publisher-side fraud and one reason networks ban iframes and unattended redirects.