Stopping affiliate fraud without scaring off good partners

The good news first

The vast majority of affiliates are honest people who like your product. Fraud prevention should be invisible to them: no extra paperwork, no delayed payouts without a reason. The trick is to let rules catch the obvious cases and hold the questionable ones for a human decision.

1. Self-referrals

What it looks like: someone signs up as an affiliate and buys through their own link to earn a commission on their own purchase.

How to catch it: compare the buyer with the affiliate. A conversion where the customer's email matches the affiliate's email should be flagged, not paid automatically. Your program terms should say clearly whether self-referrals are allowed (usually they are not).

2. Purchases from the affiliate's own browser

What it looks like: the affiliate uses a second email address, but buys from the same computer they use to check their affiliate dashboard.

How to catch it: compare the click that led to the sale with the browser the affiliate signs in from. A match is a strong signal. This works with a daily-salted, one-way visitor hash, so you never need to store anyone's IP address.

3. Customers who were already referred

What it looks like: a customer who was credited to one affiliate shows up again through another affiliate's link, sometimes because a coupon site or a browser extension inserted itself at checkout.

How to catch it: flag conversions of a customer who is already credited to a different affiliate, and decide case by case.

4. Refund and chargeback abuse

What it looks like: buy through a link, collect the commission, then ask for a refund.

How to stop it: two settings solve this completely:

• a hold period that matches your refund window, so commissions stay pending until the payment is final, and
• automatic reversals when your payment platform reports a refund or a dispute.

5. Cookie stuffing and click spam

What it looks like: hidden links, pop-unders or bots that drop referral cookies on visitors who never chose to click.

How to catch it: watch for affiliates with lots of clicks but almost no conversions, clicks from unexpected websites, and many repeated clicks from the same visitor. De-duplicating repeated clicks keeps your conversion rates honest.

6. Spammy or misleading promotion

What it looks like: spam emails, fake reviews, ads bidding on your brand name, or claims you would never make.

How to stop it: write the rules down in your program terms, require affiliates to accept them at sign-up, and review new applications by hand for the first few weeks. It takes a minute per affiliate and keeps your program clean from day one.

Put it together

• Flagged conversions are held, never approved automatically.
• Clean conversions are approved automatically after the hold period.
• You review the few flagged ones and approve or reverse them.

That way honest partners are paid on time, and the rare bad actor never sees a payout.