Redirecting 404 traffic is cookie stuffing in my opinion.
Let's take this example, a desktop browser that is requesting favicon. Your server response:
Code:
teensofukraine.com/favicon.ico
GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1
Host: teensofukraine.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:26.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/26.0 AlexaToolbar/alxf-2.19
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
DNT: 1
Connection: keep-alive
HTTP/1.0 302 Moved Temporarily
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2014 22:26:42 GMT
Server: Apache/2
Location: trackfwc.com/cgi-bin/fwcc.cgi/5/48020:teensofukraine
Content-Length: 313
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
X-Cache: MISS from remotelogin
X-Cache-Lookup: MISS from remotelogin:8080
Via: 1.0 remotelogin (squid/3.1.19)
Connection: keep-alive
This is the most common cookie stuffing method beside stuffing via 1px images, the missing favicon.
Well, if this is a hacker's work, he is just a script kiddie.
No need to bash AWE's aff managers, just explain them the issue, although I know cookie stuffing webmasters that are still promoting them.
Anyway, he is wasting time cookie stuffing on sites with low traffic that are not even targeted.