Shawn Hogan Sentenced - eBays #1 affiliate gets 5 months in federal prison! OUCH!

Funny, I was just going to create a thread since I knew someone else would soon.

Anyway, long story short is that this has been going on since 2007, so this ends everything (including civil case with eBay).

I've spent millions in legal fees over the last 7 years, and taking both the criminal and civil stuff to trial would have cost many millions more. So I look at it this way... I'm not sure we would have lost the case had it gone to trial, but there's no guarantee. It's cheaper to settle/take a plea deal, and not have to worry about something crazy happening in a trial where a jury feels like they are doing you a "favor" and fine you $10M restitution and put you in prison for 10 years.

When the option presents itself to do a global settlement that ends the criminal and civil suit, spend a few months at prison camp, well... it's something you will seriously consider regardless if you think you could have prevailed in the civil or criminal suits. After 7 years neither had even gone to trial yet and would have cost many millions of dollars to defend (so in a best case scenario, you are out millions of dollars to defend something, and probably spend another 5 years of your life dealing with the legal system). Just want to get all this dumb stuff over with really.

 

Doesn't really matter to me to be honest, I'm not doing anything they would have a remote interest in, and having a felony isn't all that bad (has it's upside too).

With a felony, you can't:

• Serve on a jury for jury duty (oh darn... lol)
• Vote (while, I should have voted in my life, I've never had the time... I've never registered to vote because I don't know how, and also because I think the voting system is so screwy with the electoral system that a vote from someone in California [never a close state], really has no meaning). So I'll continue to not vote.
• Own a gun (never have owned a gun or even shot a gun in my life... not that I'm against guns, just never interested me).

Maybe more difficult to get a good job, but I'm also not looking for employment, so...

 

Not starving or living under a bridge or anything... but also wouldn't consider myself "rich". If anyone *actually* knows me, they also know I'm not money driven, so I have no desire to try to "get rich" either.

 

Either way, they can look at whatever they want... it's nothing too interesting, so...

You would think so, but some programs actually encourage it. Maybe not at the company level, but when you pay your affiliate program managers based on "how well" the affiliate program is doing, there definitely are some affiliate program managers that will encourage it.

Until they stop compensating the program managers based on how much the affiliates under them make, you will always have program managers encouraging it.

Check the "Cookie Stuffers" section here: https://tools.digitalpoint.com/cookie-search

 

Well, that has nothing to do with this topic, but yeah... that's why the Deprecated areas were replaced:

Anything here has been deprecated (and not indexed by Google on top of it):
https://forums.digitalpoint.com/forums/deprecated.96/

Those areas have been replaced with the Digital Goods sections that give us more management/control: https://marketplace.digitalpoint.com/

The "Other" section are areas that aren't (yet) deprecated, but are moving in that direction... threads aren't indexed by Google and only premium members are allowed to post new threads (these are the areas we deem problematic and are trying to just phase out without it being a totally abrupt thing for those that rely on them for whatever reason): https://forums.digitalpoint.com/forums/other.24/

Again, this thread is not the right place to talk about it though. If you want to talk about the problematic areas, go here: https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/problematic-buy-sell-trade-areas.2702436/

 

Google doesn't report people's earnings to people, so any of those "top earners" rankings are totally fabricated.