Facebook can't really fix this. The affiliates are always 2 steps ahead of them. If you get banned as an affiliate, it literally takes like 5 minutes to setup a new account.
It amazes me how little people who putatively work in businesses on the Internet understand about Internet marketing. I understand, given that it often resembles Satan's seedy underbelly, but if you are involved in marketing on the Internet (do you sell ad inventory? Congrats, welcome to the party) you need to understand at least this much: there is no legitimate way to extract $X from users who don't have $X to spend.
Everything else in the discussion is, like Jason from Hot or Not said, a smokescreen.
Incidentally, affiliate marketing makes the most sense for products which have extraordinarily high margins. Those are the ones in which the advertiser/vendor has the most amount of money to split with his affiliate, who then has the most amount of money to pay for traffic acquisition (by paying FarmVille or some intermediary service or buying AdWords or whatever). There are many legitimate products which have high margins associated with them -- software, for example -- but the field also tends to attract scams.
Software is actually almost the perfect legitimate affiliate good, because the margin for downloadable software is essentially 100% less transactional costs. If you don't see software offers, you can be pretty sure that the scams have taken over. Why don't you see software offers? Two reasons: you can't outcompete the vendor and affiliates (in this scenario) add essentially no value so as soon as there are two of them they'll bid away all their profits. (Edit to add: there are scenarios outside the scope of ScamVille in which an affiliate can actually add value. Ask me some other time.)
For example, pretend I offered you $15 to generate sales of my $30 software. If I had exactly one affiliate, and they paid some World of Dragonfarming Online game to give dragon eggs to people who bought my software, they might be able to pay $5 for dragon eggs to generate the $30 sale ($15 commission) and keep $10. However, as soon as I have two affiliates, the market collapses instantly, because both players outbid each other: affiliate #2 offers $6 in dragon eggs, affiliate #1 offers $7 ... somebody gets to $15 and the affiliates find themselves disintermediated. (Note that I could, incidentally, buy the eggs myself if you prove that this concept works, and I will always be able to outbid you because I make ~$29 per sale, not $15. Affiliates hate this, mostly because it happens so often.)
Do you see how the math virtually demands that there is no honest money to be made in this, even selling a good which is the paradigmatic best case for the model? That, plus the fact that very few Facebookers want to actually fork over $30 for their dragon eggs, is why the dishonest money always wins out.
Further note: the best point in the article is the one about mixing different streams of traffic together. It is like a dishonest factory which cuts their hamburgers with sawdust. (The Jungle, for the information age.)
so.....why does that make what amounts to stealing $X from the users ok?
kudos to companies cutting their losses and walking away. hats off to those who can innovate and actually get users to pay $X legitimately.
i have a real problem with people thinking they can force a user into something he doesn't want. if he's not going to pay, then either acknowledge that you're giving him a free lunch or walk away.
One thing worth point out though is that affiliate marketing is a huge force-multiplier for the company selling the product, which is why it exists in the first place.
If you have software (or whatever) you're trying to sell and you don't do an affiliate program your advertising budget is basically limited to your cash on hand.
If you run an affiliate program you can potentially get other suckers to spend their resources advertising your product on speculation; you only pay those marketers who successfully make sales, and get the other advertising for free.
A cute corollary is that you have to be tracking what they do tightly enough that you can reverse engineer the successful affiliates' strategies and self-implement them.
So affiliate marketing isn't going anywhere, but outside of the inevitable outliers the economics of it are such that the major profits will be made in scammy products, and thus the bulk of successful affiliate marketers will be marketing scams or worse.
Unless you're in the real estate business.
A legit company has to spend money on actually providing a quality product. + the legit company has to give the full information up front, while the scammer can trick the user into pulling out a credit card.