TLDR: Affiliate fraud is more common than most programmes want to admit, but it’s also more preventable than most teams realise. This guide walks through the main fraud types to know, the warning signs to watch for in your own data, and a practical seven-step process for auditing, configuring, and future-proofing your affiliate programme.
Affiliate fraud doesn’t always look dramatic. It rarely announces itself. More often, it shows up quietly, like a publisher that’s suddenly jumped from nowhere into your top five, a conversion rate that looks a little too high, click volumes that don’t quite match the revenue they should be generating.
Left unchecked, it skews your performance data, inflates your commission payments, and makes it harder to see which parts of your programme are genuinely working. It can also erode trust with your legitimate affiliate partners, the high-quality publishers who are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do.
The good news is that with the right structure, the right tools, and the right habits in place, most affiliate fraud is preventable. This guide covers everything you need to know, from understanding the main fraud types to building a programme resilient enough to catch problems before they cost you.
Step 1: Understand the main fraud types in affiliate marketing
Before you can protect your programme, you need to know what you’re protecting it against. Affiliate fraud takes several forms, and each one works differently.
Brand search hijacking
This is the most common form. An affiliate bids on your brand name, often combined with terms like ‘discount code’, through paid search, without your authorisation. When a customer searches for your brand and clicks one of these results, the affiliate captures the commission on a sale that would almost certainly have happened anyway. You’re effectively paying commission on traffic you already owned.
It’s worth noting that brand bidding isn’t always fraudulent. Some advertisers agree it with specific partners, large voucher sites, for instance, in return for agreed exposure. The problem is when it happens without your knowledge or consent. If it’s not authorised, it’s hijacking.
Click stuffing and cookie dropping
Click stuffing involves artificially inflating click volumes to claim commission on conversions the affiliate had no real part in generating. Cookie dropping works similarly, affiliates place tracking cookies on a user’s browser without them ever genuinely engaging with the affiliate’s content, meaning the affiliate gets credited for organic conversions it didn’t influence.
These are harder to spot at a glance but tend to show up as anomalies when you look closely at the data, unusually high click volumes, very short click-to-conversion times, or conversion rates that seem implausibly consistent.
Fake lead generation
On lead-based programmes, some affiliates submit false contact data to trigger commission payouts. The leads look real on the surface but don’t convert to genuine customers because the underlying data, names, email addresses, phone numbers, isn’t valid.
This is particularly prevalent on programmes where commission is paid at the point of lead submission rather than at a later validation stage.
Step 2: Know the warning signs in your own data
Fraud rarely hides perfectly. If you know what to look for, the signs are usually there. The challenge is building the habit of looking for them regularly and knowing when something that looks unusual actually is.
Publisher performance that doesn’t add up
One of the clearest warning signs is a publisher that has historically driven little or nothing suddenly appearing in your top performers. If a partner jumps dramatically month on month and you haven’t run any specific activity with them, that warrants investigation. Ask what changed. If there’s no clear answer, dig deeper.
Traffic spikes without a clear cause
A sudden, significant increase in traffic or revenue from a single source, particularly outside of a period where you’d expect it, is a red flag. Check the order numbers, look at click-to-conversion times, and cross-reference what you’re seeing in the affiliate network against your own internal data. Affiliate networks now often provide time-from-click-to-conversion data, which can be especially revealing.
Conversion rates that seem too clean
Unusually high or suspiciously consistent conversion rates from a specific publisher can indicate click stuffing or cookie dropping. Real affiliate traffic tends to show some natural variation. If a partner is converting at a rate that looks more like a data artefact than genuine customer behaviour, treat it as a signal to investigate.
Leads that don’t follow through
On lead generation programmes, keep a close eye on the quality of leads being submitted. If a publisher is generating high volumes of leads that consistently fail validation, wrong contact details, numbers that don’t connect, emails that bounce, that’s a pattern worth acting on quickly.
Step 3: Run a fraud audit on your current programme
Monitoring is something you should be doing every day. But a deeper audit, where you step back and look at the programme as a whole, should happen on a structured schedule.
As a baseline, check performance daily. Even a brief look at where traffic and revenue is coming from, and which publishers are driving it, keeps you close enough to spot anomalies early. A weekly review should give you a slightly broader picture, publisher trends, any emerging patterns, anything that warrants closer attention.
A full programme audit, where you review publisher performance in depth, look at who’s active, who’s inactive, and whether anyone’s performance has shifted in ways you can’t explain, should happen at least quarterly.
That said, don’t wait for the schedule if something looks wrong. If a publisher’s performance spikes dramatically, investigate it immediately. The cost of acting early is a few hours of your time. The cost of acting late is potentially months of inflated commission payments and skewed data.
What to look for in a programme audit
- Publishers who have never driven results suddenly driving significant volume
- Affiliates who applied to the programme but have never been active and whether they should remain on it
- Any publisher whose performance has increased dramatically without a clear reason
- Whether your publisher approvals process is tight enough. Are you accepting anyone who applies, or genuinely vetting them?
- Whether your terms and conditions are clear on what’s allowed and what isn’t
Step 4: Configure your network’s fraud detection settings
If you’re running your affiliate programme through Awin, you have access to a significant amount of built-in fraud prevention infrastructure, much of which works in the background without any action required from you. Understanding what’s there helps you make better use of it.
Awin’s Partner Compliance Team
Awin’s dedicated compliance function consists of 15 specialists across multiple markets, focused exclusively on fraud prevention and detection. They maintain an internal database of over 55,000 partner accounts with documented compliance issues, which means suspicious activity can often be flagged before it reaches you.
First transaction monitoring
Every new partner on Awin generating their first transaction is reviewed for signs of fraudulent activity. The compliance team looks for red flags including exceptionally high order values, unusually short click-to-conversion times, content mismatches on the advertising space, and geographic discrepancies between the user’s IP location and the advertiser’s primary market.
Payment review process
Awin reviews payments twice a month, on the 1st and 15th, to catch suspicious accounts before they receive a payout. Every new partner goes through a manual compliance check before their first payment is processed. Any changes to partner bank details are also verified before payments are made.
Performance audits and traffic analysis
Significant spikes in performance trigger a review, with payments paused if suspicious patterns are detected. Awin also uses third-party analytics tools to verify partner traffic sources and cross-reference against internal records, making it harder for bot-driven or misattributed traffic to go undetected.
Third-party tools Awin works with
Awin works alongside several specialist tools to extend its fraud detection capability:
- AdPolice – monitors paid search advertising for unauthorised keyword usage across Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and alerts the compliance team when non-compliant activity is detected.
- IP Quality Score (IPQS) – provides real-time fraud risk analysis on IP addresses, phone numbers, emails, and URLs, helping to identify fake partner profiles and bot-driven transactions.
- SimilarWeb – analyses website traffic patterns to detect anomalies, sudden spikes, and discrepancies in traffic origin.
Use the compliance team. They’re there to help, and escalating something to them, particularly if you need a publisher suspended quickly, is often faster than trying to manage it yourself.
Step 5: Implement advertiser-level fraud controls
The network’s infrastructure is a strong foundation, but there are controls you can put in place at the advertiser level that add another layer of protection.
Be clear in your terms and conditions
If brand bidding isn’t allowed on your programme, that needs to be stated explicitly in your terms and conditions. Affiliates can’t be held to a rule they weren’t told about. Most affiliate networks include a section in the programme setup where you can specify whether brand bidding is permitted, use it. And make sure anything else that’s off-limits is written out clearly, so there’s no ambiguity if you ever need to act on it.
Tighten your publisher approvals process
A lot of affiliate fraud originates from low-quality publisher sites that never should have been approved in the first place. When you’re reviewing a publisher application, look at what type of publisher they are, where they’re based, what their website looks like, and which other brands they’re working with. A publisher with a poor-quality site, no recognisable brand partners, and little transparency about how they promote is worth scrutinising carefully before you approve them.
The reputable publishers, the established cashback and voucher sites, the high-quality content partners, simply have too much to lose from fraudulent behaviour. The risk tends to come from the edges of the network, not the centre of it.
Only pay on validated activity
On lead generation programmes, don’t pay on lead submission. Pay on validated, approved activity, whether that’s a confirmed install, a booked follow-up call, or whatever your programme’s specific conversion event is. That way, even if fake leads are submitted, you’re not paying for them. You still need to identify and address the pattern, but at least you’re not losing money on it in the meantime.
Build in a three-strike rule, with exceptions
A tiered approach works well for managing repeat offenders. Minor or first-time violations, a publisher bidding on brand terms without authorisation, for example, can be managed with a warning and a clear expectation. Repeated violations should escalate. A three-strike rule, after which the publisher is removed from the programme, gives you a consistent framework to apply.
That said, some activity warrants immediate suspension rather than a warning. If something genuinely fraudulent is flagged, not just a policy breach but active manipulation of your data or commission structure, work with the affiliate network to suspend the publisher immediately. Note that on most networks, including Awin, you can’t suspend a publisher unilaterally, there’s typically a process that runs through the network. Build a relationship with your account contact so you can escalate quickly when you need to.
Keep your lines of communication open
Have monthly calls with your top affiliate partners. These conversations aren’t just good programme management, they mean that if you do ever need to reach out to a partner about something that looks unusual, you already have a relationship. You’re not introducing yourself cold in the same message where you’re raising a concern.
Step 6: Use AI tools to detect patterns you can’t see manually
Manual monitoring gets you a long way, but affiliate fraud can move fast, and some patterns are genuinely difficult to spot when you’re looking at data point by point. This is where AI-powered tools start to add real value.
The most useful applications are around anomaly detection and pattern recognition. AI tools can analyse large volumes of transaction and traffic data to identify statistical outliers, things that fall outside the normal range of behaviour for a given publisher or time period, far more quickly than a manual review would catch them.
For brand bidding specifically, tools like Brand Verity trawl search engines for any sites bidding on the search terms you define. If an unauthorised site appears, Brand Verity generates a report so you can take action. This kind of automated monitoring matters because unauthorised brand bidding can happen at any time of day, including outside your working hours and catching it early limits the damage.
Within ASK BOSCO®, you can set up KPI Alerts that flag when performance metrics shift outside defined thresholds. Rather than waiting for a weekly review to notice that a publisher’s conversion volume has jumped unusually, you get an alert in real time, so you can investigate and act before the pattern compounds.
The broader principle is that AI tools don’t replace human judgement, but they make sure the right things reach your attention at the right time. Fraud rarely disappears on its own. The faster you catch it, the easier it is to address.
Step 7: Build a fraud-resilient programme structure
Most affiliate fraud is opportunistic. It tends to happen when a programme is loosely structured, lightly monitored, and hasn’t clearly defined what’s acceptable. A well-run programme with tight publisher approvals, clear terms and conditions, daily monitoring, and strong network relationships is simply a harder target.
These are the structural habits that make the biggest difference:
- Check performance daily as a minimum, multiple times a day if the programme is a significant revenue driver. Any anomaly should be investigated before the next check, not logged and reviewed later.
- Run a deeper publisher audit at least quarterly. Look at who’s active, who isn’t, what’s changed, and whether the programme’s publisher mix still reflects the quality bar you’ve set.
- Keep your terms and conditions current and specific. If something isn’t explicitly addressed, an affiliate may reasonably assume it’s allowed.
- Be selective at the approvals stage. Every publisher you add to your programme is a risk you’re taking on. Make the vetting meaningful.
- Work closely with your affiliate network’s compliance team. They have visibility across the whole network that you don’t, use it.
- Invest in monitoring tools. Brand Verity for brand bidding, IPQS for traffic quality, your network’s built-in analytics for performance anomalies. The tools exist. Using them consistently is what makes the difference.
One final thought
Affiliate fraud is a real risk, but it shouldn’t put you off running an affiliate programme. Managed well, affiliate marketing remains one of the most cost-effective, scalable channels available to ecommerce brands. The risks are manageable, the tools to manage them are increasingly good. And the habits that protect your programme are also the habits that make it perform better.
If you’d like an independent audit of your affiliate programme, or you’re looking to build out a fraud-resilient structure from scratch, speak to the Modo25 affiliate team. We’ve managed affiliate programmes across a wide range of sectors and know exactly what to look for.
