is blackhat marketing illegal?

Black Hat is more a question of ethics than legality.
Many things may be unethical while still legal, these are black hat.
Other things may be unethical while being illegal, these are also black hat.

It really depends on what you're doing, black hat is just an ethically debatable category.

Is driving a car illegal? No, well, maybe, if you're running people over.
 
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No blackhat isn't illegal and in many cases just utilizing a loophole or bending the rules slightly. No one ever gets hurt or goes to jail for blackhatting.
 
it depends imo, say you send huge amount of spam emails from botnet.
 
cashout453 said:
Is this a fact? And cl does have a tos. And one of their tos is no affilate marketing. So according to you, if I went on a site like cl and spammed, it wouldn't be considered illegal? How do you know this to be true? Can anyone confirm this 100%? I live in canada btw.
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You are overthinking the things. BH is not illegal of course, but some people think that fraudulent activity is the same as BH and that might get you in trouble. I have been scraping and spamming for the past 2-3 years and not even a single complaint. NO ONE IS GOING TO SUE THE AVERAGE JOE FOR THE THINGS HE IS DOING ON THE INTERNET(of course excluding stealing).

12040 said:
it depends imo, say you send huge amount of spam emails from botnet.
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And of course this is hacking and has nothing to do with BH, this will get you in trouble sooner or later. But you will get the title "spam king" and an article dedicated to you in wiki, so it is a win win scenario - you will have a lot of food for thought while in jail.
 
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GiorgioB said:
dude, breaking CL's TOS isn't illegal.. you won't go to jail. You'll probably just get banned from CL.
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So affiliate marketing on a cl wouldnt be illegal, how sure are you about this? What the hell is the point of a tos anyways, if it has no significance?

bullseye123 said:
Well it definitely is not illegal, but these day's doing heavy black-hat methods gets your website banned from google very fast.
So if your traffic is not coming from search engines, and your not planning to make money with Adsense then you can definitely try it.

There is however some blackhat methods that is used in a white hat type of way. Take backlinking for instance, most of the providers use
automatic way's of getting you the backlinks faster then what you will be able to do on your own manually this is black hat, but they do it in such
a way that google thinks it is normal and there is spinned ( blackhat) original ( whitehat) content on high PageRank websites with low OBL to your
website. So in this way loads of us are using blackhat way's.

To just answer your question straight, Blackhat is not illegal, it is more of a risk in getting all your hard work de-ranked and blocked or punished loosing
all your hardwork and money spend on a project if taken too far.
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No, Im not doing any backlinking, just want to do affiliate marketing but have this crazy idea that it's illegal if i use blackhat technique

Eneon said:
Black Hat is more a question of ethics than legality.
Many things may be unethical while still legal, these are black hat.
Other things may be unethical while being illegal, these are also black hat.

It really depends on what you're doing, black hat is just an ethically debatable category.

Is driving a car illegal? No, well, maybe, if you're running people over.
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So what things would be unethical while being illegal?

12040 said:
it depends imo, say you send huge amount of spam emails from botnet.
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No, I dont want to do that, but how would that be any different from spamming?

theMagicNumber said:
You are overthinking the things. BH is not illegal of course, but some people think that fraudulent activity is the same as BH and that might get you in trouble. I have been scraping and spamming for the past 2-3 years and not even a single complaint. NO ONE IS GOING TO SUE THE AVERAGE JOE FOR THE THINGS HE IS DOING ON THE INTERNET(of course excluding stealing).


And of course this is hacking and has nothing to do with BH, this will get you in trouble sooner or later. But you will get the title "spam king" and an article dedicated to you in wiki, so it is a win win scenario - you will have a lot of food for thought while in jail.
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So spamming classified sites with the a blackhat method wouldn't be considered fraud? Like, for example, making a post about having an item then, whn ppl msg u, saying its sold but directing them to your affiliate link. Someone on here in another thread said that this constitutes fraud.
 
The reason why this question cannot be answered with a straight yes or no is because of perception. Many people have a different definition for 'blackhat'.

What it should actually be however is like cheating in an online game, Giving yourself an advantage by using 3rd party programs making your work easier and getting you to your goal faster.
 
cashout453 said:
Is this a fact? And cl does have a tos. And one of their tos is no affilate marketing. So according to you, if I went on a site like cl and spammed, it wouldn't be considered illegal? How do you know this to be true? Can anyone confirm this 100%? I live in canada btw.
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No, it's not illegal unless you are violating CAN-SPAM by not providing an opt-out but dude if you're this worried simply don't do it, nobody is forcing you.
 
bertbaby said:
No, it's not illegal unless you are violating CAN-SPAM by not providing an opt-out but dude if you're this worried simply don't do it, nobody is forcing you.
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I see, well I want to make money :) I guess like a member said before, its more a question of ethics then anything. Does anyone know an ethical method I could use to affiliate market on cl? I don't consider sending ppl to penny action sites as ethical, since I have heard that most of them don't operate in a fair manner.
 
BH marketing is about saying to heck with the rules, to heck with the gurus, and slapping back at Google and other conventional entities that would unreasonably inhibit people from banking in IM. Black hat is not illegal, though many of its tactics can be cast as "misrepresentation" or fraudulent depending on how aggressively someone is intent on interpreting them as such.

BH SEO is only one category of BH IM, there are loads of other black hat strategies that don't even involve gaming Google. BH just bypasses certain artificial barriers that are blocking people from enjoying a true stable business online, thereby restoring an undistorted free market in making money on the web.
 
GiorgioB said:
^^ really? is it really necessary to repeat the post just above yours just to get your post count up?

Also, how does it depend on what you are doing? Please explain, I am curious. Of course if you are promoting a scam/kiddy porn/etc.. website via BH ways, then it is the scam/kiddy porn/etc.. website that is illegal, surely not the black hat methods.
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I usually open all of the interesting threads I see on a new tab all at once. I'll go through and read, and add my obnoxious/smart opinions.. and I've noticed often, there are ten more comments in the time it took me to submit. If he's doing this kind of stuff to get his post count up, time will tell.


To help answer the OP question.... no, it's not. It can be used to do illegal things, but so can white hat SEO. IMO, blackhat just means it's against terms of service of a lot of things... like making a ton of accounts and posting links. That's not illegal, but it's certainly against TOS of web 2.0 accounts.

I got into blackhat stuff because I wanted to maintain anonymity with everything. (which is also against TOS of a lot of stuff), but not illegal.

Perfect example -

Giving paypal a false name - perfectly legal, and blackhat (only because they're not a bank)
Giving a bank a false name - illegal in the US, because you can't do that..


I'll put it this way, there is a lot of stuff we're not allowed to talk about on this site, usually because it's illegal.
Also, just because it's legal, doesn't mean you won't get sued.
 
what is blackhat? everybody here has different definations.
 
12040 said:
what is blackhat? everybody here has different definations.
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Definitions are pretty much the same..

It comes from old (REALLY OLD) movies where the villain wore a black hat, and the hero would where a white hat.

Most people aren't villians though. Think of it like spy vs. spy. It's two sides of the same coin.
 
Furious George said:
I usually open all of the interesting threads I see on a new tab all at once. I'll go through and read, and add my obnoxious/smart opinions.. and I've noticed often, there are ten more comments in the time it took me to submit. If he's doing this kind of stuff to get his post count up, time will tell.


To help answer the OP question.... no, it's not. It can be used to do illegal things, but so can white hat SEO. IMO, blackhat just means it's against terms of service of a lot of things... like making a ton of accounts and posting links. That's not illegal, but it's certainly against TOS of web 2.0 accounts.

I got into blackhat stuff because I wanted to maintain anonymity with everything. (which is also against TOS of a lot of stuff), but not illegal.

Perfect example -

Giving paypal a false name - perfectly legal, and blackhat (only because they're not a bank)
Giving a bank a false name - illegal in the US, because you can't do that..


I'll put it this way, there is a lot of stuff we're not allowed to talk about on this site, usually because it's illegal.
Also, just because it's legal, doesn't mean you won't get sued.
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So, what do you think would happen if I wanted to do affiliate marketing on cl?
 
GiorgioB said:
^^ really? is it really necessary to repeat the post just above yours just to get your post count up?

Also, how does it depend on what you are doing? Please explain, I am curious. Of course if you are promoting a scam/kiddy porn/etc.. website via BH ways, then it is the scam/kiddy porn/etc.. website that is illegal, surely not the black hat methods.
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Eg, Scraping a list of email addresses and then spamming those emails with an offer is illegal.
 
cashout453 said:
So, what do you think would happen if I wanted to do affiliate marketing on cl?
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Based on your rep, duration as a member, and previous posts, you'd probably be wasting your time.

Why don't you just come right out and ask for advice instead of beating around the bush with threads and posts like this?

(fyi... cl talk is not allowed)
 
GiorgioB said:
Blackhat marketing is only breaking the rules of Google.. as far as I know Google is not the law. so no, its not illegal.
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Are you suggesting that black hat marketing only involves Google?

Everyone knows here, there's no clear answer.
 
macdonjo3 said:
Are you suggesting that black hat marketing only involves Google?

Everyone knows here, there's no clear answer.
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quote_icon.png
Originally Posted by GiorgioB
Blackhat marketing is only breaking the rules of {Google|Yahoo|Bing|Facebook|Youtube|Craigslist|email provider|etc, etc}.. as far as I know {Google|Yahoo|Bing|Facebook|Youtube|Craigslist|email provider|etc, etc} is not the law. so no, its not illegal.


Sorry, i thought it was obvious but clarified for the sake of it :)
 
Sorry to revive an old thread but I had a question.

Say you were spamming several chat sites with predefined messages with bots that have multiple threads 50-200k conversions per day. You aren't stealing from anyone or causing them any immediate harm, but you are asking them to complete an action (should they choose to).

Again is that classed as spam and unethical, but not illegal i.e. ? So what you would be able to do yourself, but with a bot so you can do MANY times more conversations than if you did it manually.

You wouldn't go to jail, but should the owners decide to track you down, could they at least try to sue for damages and disruption of their service?

Or ban your IP's

Anyone who has experience in this, would be nice if they could share some light on what they know regarding this.
 
The problem with the "is xy legal?" threads is that NO ONE can answer the question without knowing which countries' law is applicable. I think that it's careless when some people just answer that it's legal, when in realtiy they can't even know the answer without knowing which country the questioner is from. For example, some Western countries have very strict anti-spam laws while other countries don't even have laws related to spam.
 
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