Affiliate Fraud, Coupon Abuse and Brand Bidding Enforcement

In the regulated programmes I have audited most recently, between 9 and 31 percent of paid commission went to partners whose median time from click to conversion was under twenty seconds. Nobody reads a page, decides and buys in twenty seconds. That is interception, and it is where I start, because it needs no vendor, no score and no argument: the timestamps are already sitting in your network's own click and conversion logs. The distributions I pull first: Click-to-conversion time by partner and sub-ID. The share of conversions where the partner's click is the only touch in the path against the share where it is the last of several. New against returning customer split, which on coupon and loyalty inventory usually runs inverted to the programme average. Discount code redemption by code, because a code appearing in a partner's traffic that was never issued to them tells you exactly where your codes leak. On lead-side programmes, device, geo and IP concentration by hour. Extension and toolbar behaviour: Dashboards do not see extension injection, so this part is done by hand. I run your checkout in clean browser profiles with the major shopping extensions installed one at a time, proxying through mitmproxy, and record which of them fires an affiliate click without a user action, at which DOM event, and whether your attribution accepted it. The output is a table of extension, trigger, and whether that click was paid. Programmes are usually surprised by which partner ID the injected click carries. Trademark and brand bidding: Monitoring through BrandVerity or The Search Monitor across the markets that matter, plus manual checks on misspellings and brand-plus-modifier terms, which the tools under-sample. In regulated verticals this counts twice: a partner bidding on your brand and landing traffic on a page carrying an unapproved claim is a regulatory problem before it is a margin problem. Lead-side abuse: Duplicate detection across a rolling ninety days on hashed contact fields, consent proof present or absent per record, form-fill timing, and the same person sold to you and to a competitor inside the hour. Where you buy leads, I check whether the source named on the certificate matches the source in the postback. Enforcement: Findings without a policy get overturned. So the enforcement clauses go into the programme terms first: what constitutes a breach, the notice period, the reversal window, and the standard of evidence. Findings are then applied under it. A network will back a reversal that follows published policy and will not back a retroactive sweep, which is why the slower path is the only one that survives contact with the network's own compliance team. What I will not do: I will not mass-reverse historic commission on the strength of a fraud score. Vendor scores are an input, never the decision, and every removal in my reports carries reproducible evidence a partner could contest. I do not run stings, do not approach partners under a false identity, and will not remove a partner because somebody in sales dislikes them. Who should not buy this: Programmes that want a number for a board deck. The finding is usually that a fifth of the channel's paid revenue was never incremental, and acting on it lowers reported channel revenue before it improves anything at all. If you cannot spend that number politically, the report will sit in a drawer and we will both have wasted a month. Also programmes on a platform that will not release partner-level click logs. Without timestamps there is nothing to measure, and I will tell you that before invoicing rather than after.