Affiliate fraud costs twice. You pay an affiliate for traffic that was never real, and the advertiser who notices it pays you less, or leaves. The good news: most fraud follows a handful of patterns, and each one leaves a trace you can check for.
The common types of affiliate fraud
Bot and server traffic
Clicks from scripts, headless browsers or cloud servers. Real people browse from home and mobile networks, not from data centers.
VPNs, proxies and Tor
Used to fake the visitor’s country, so traffic from one place passes as traffic from a high-paying geo.
Click floods
Hundreds of clicks from one IP on one offer, hoping one of them gets credit for a conversion that would have happened anyway.
Fake leads and incentivised conversions
Form fills with made-up details, or real people paid to sign up and never use the product. These often convert unnaturally fast after the click.
Cookie stuffing and attribution theft
Dropping tracking on visitors who never chose to click, so the affiliate takes credit for sales they didn’t drive. Server-to-server tracking with click IDs makes this much harder than cookie-only tracking.
Check every click, not just reports
Reviewing a fraud report at the end of the month is too late: the advertiser has already seen the traffic. The better place to check is the click itself, before the redirect. For each check, decide what happens:
- Allow the click and log it.
- Flag it, so any conversion from it is held for review.
- Block it and send the visitor to a fallback page instead of the advertiser.
In Affilix these checks run on the click server as part of the redirect, covering data centers, VPN and proxy providers, Tor exit nodes, bots and click floods, without calling an outside service on every click.
Hold suspicious conversions
Some fraud only shows at the conversion. Rules worth setting:
- Hold conversions that happen too fast after the click, or too long after it.
- Hold when one IP converts too many times in a day.
- Hold any conversion from a click a rule flagged.
A held conversion pays nobody and fires no affiliate postback until you approve it. You review a short list instead of the whole month.
Tighten rules where the risk is
A high-payout finance offer needs stricter rules than a low-payout app install. Set different rules per offer, block known bad IP ranges, and block a sub ID or source for one affiliate without removing the affiliate altogether.
Talk to your affiliates
Most affiliates are honest, and many problems come from one bad source inside a good affiliate’s traffic. Share the sub ID that caused the problem, give them a chance to cut it, and keep a record of what was rejected and why.
A simple fraud checklist
- Block or flag data center, VPN, proxy and Tor traffic on high-value offers.
- Set a click flood limit per IP and offer.
- Hold conversions with unusual timing.
- Use S2S postbacks with click IDs instead of cookies alone.
- Review held conversions before every payout run.
- Look at conversion rate by sub ID every week.
See how Affilix anti-fraud works, or read how sub IDs help you find bad sources.