PartnerMatrix shares six ‘red flags’ for affiliate marketing fraud

Levon Nikoghosyan, CEO at PartnerMatrix, has shared six of the biggest red flags for affiliate marketing fraud in online gambling, which is estimated to have reached $1.4 billion in 2020.

Writing in a blog post for EveryMatrix, the affiliate marketing platform’s parent company, he advised getting to know the key types of activity that suggest a possible scam.

The first is that at least one IP of the affiliate matches that of one of its players or sub affiliates. This can indicate that your affiliate is trying to obtain commissions with their personal account.

The second example of suspicious activity would be if the percentage of active players ratio from a single affiliate is higher than 50% during the calculation period.

Thirdly, if an affiliate commits to bringing traffic from a certain blog as part of your agreement, but traffic then comes from different sources, that should be investigated.

Players showing suspiciously short lifetimes was the fourth red flag highlighted by Nikoghosyan, as he noted that these players might be bots visiting your platform to perform some actions and send bonus money to their creators. 

A fifth red flag would be that the stake amount of a single bet is more than X% of the amount of the total bets: This is a key instance where Anti-Fraud intelligence should be used to detect unusual behaviours such as a difference in bets amounts among affiliates and players.

The sixth and final example shared in the post was when the affiliate’s login IP doesn’t match their country, which might mean the affiliate is trying to get a commission by breaking the rules.

Nikoghosyan said: “There are a lot of behaviours that need to be carefully monitored and checked. The good news though is that technology is catching up to fraudsters.

“The variety of affiliate marketing fraud schemes and mechanisms has naturally triggered some countermeasures. For instance, PartnerMatrix has developed the Anti-Fraud Intelligence tool to automatically stop any type of affiliate fraud on the spot. It acts so smoothly that your affiliate manager won’t even know about it until he receives the system’s notification.”

For more on commission types, understanding how affiliates can try to exploit ‘weak points’ in the system and working with automatic anti-fraud detection tools such as those from PartnerMatrix, read the full blog HERE.