Fraud

Publication date: 20 Feb 2023

Fraud is a type of scam that involves activities carried out in order to receive rewards from an affiliate network by deception. Fraudsters use a variety of methods to mislead affiliates into paying affiliate commissions that they are not supposed to pay. This can be done by sending undesirable traffic to a landing page or by using bots. However, there may be considerably more schemes.

How does fraud work?

Affiliate fraud takes many forms, the best known of which are:

• Spamming via email.
• Redirecting traffic from an affiliate site to a scam site.
• Fake clicks or referrals.
• Illegal transactions – making purchases using stolen credit card credentials or registering fake identities.
• Website cloning which is copying websites and content from real advertisers to mislead potential customers by confusing them and directing traffic to the wrong site where the conversions ultimately take place.
• Fulfillment of tasks from buxes (services of cheating), performing tasks for money (incentive traffic). By offering pennies for fulfilling the terms of the offer, the media buyer receives a generous payment from the Affiliate Program.
• Scheme traffic. Media buyer gathers an audience and tells them how he wins at the casino using different schemes.

Fraud is very detrimental to affiliate marketing: it results in companies paying huge amounts of money for low-quality traffic that leads to neither conversions nor revenues, and severely damages the reputation of the CPA network.

The 3SNET CPA Network doesn’t work with any type of fraudulent traffic. Read more: Why is fraud a bad thing?