Affiliate Fraud Prevention: Make Sure You Are 100% Safe with Phonexa

Without a doubt, fraud is one of the biggest challenges in affiliate marketing, with affiliates, advertisers, and affiliate networks all suffering from fake leads, clicks, and conversions, resulting in millions of dollars in lost revenue and broken trust.

The good news is that with Phonexa, you can prevent affiliate marketing fraud before you purchase your leads or submit them to an affiliate network. Our eight-in-one affiliate marketing software suite enables you to conduct in-depth lead analytics in real time and, based on screening results, accept or reject offered leads and phone calls with minimal risk.

Take this quiz to check your affiliate fraud prevention proficiency.

That said, affiliate fraud is getting quite elaborate, now boosted by AI that helps bad actors act quickly, more precisely, and at scale. So you have to be one step forward to protect your business and your revenue. And that can be done with Phonexa.

Without any further ado, let’s explore how our software can help you prevent affiliate fraud.

The Most Dangerous Affiliate Fraud Tricks to be Aware of

Now that everyone can produce content at scale, advertisers and affiliate networks should screen publishers and their traffic even more thoroughly, especially those who’ve just joined.

As a client with Phonexa, you get free access to our lead verification software, iClear, which you can use to screen all inbound leads and phone calls in real time before the purchase is made. This means you can design a multi-level system that screens different groups of leads across various parameters and, based on the screening results, either accepts the lead, rejects it, or optionally flags it for manual verification.

But it might be getting ahead of things a bit.

First, let’s pinpoint the main types of affiliate fraud to watch out for:

Fake Leads	If you’re not screening the leads you buy, there’s a chance you’ll eventually get some fake leads generated using disposable emails, phone numbers, or even fake or stolen identities. Likewise, you may get leads who haven’t consented to receive marketing communications from your brand, which can result in fines and even legal repercussions.
Fake Clicks	For advertisers running pay-per-click ads or affiliate marketing campaigns, it’s essential to verify that the clicks you’re buying are actually made by real customers who are genuinely interested in your product. From click farms to manual clickers to pixel stuffing, there are lots of tricks bad actors can use, so it’s worth scrutinising clicks coming from unverified partners.
Cookie Stuffing	Just like you don’t want to receive fake leads, you don’t want to buy customers who haven’t actually clicked on an affiliate link but were instead stuffed a cookie into their browser so it looks as if there was a legitimate click. Technically, cookie stuffing is done by placing hidden pixels on a website, injecting a script into the user’s browser, or forged redirects – and you want to avoid all of that at all costs.

Of course, there are more types of affiliate fraud than I’ve mentioned, but the point is that you can be 99% safe just by screening the traffic you buy or sell. Even if one out of many leads you process slips through your filtering system, it won’t have any real impact on your business.

Here are the main types of lead verification you can run as a Phonexa client:

Additionally, if you’re buying or selling leads in the automotive industry, you can use the Vehicle Data UK API feature to retrieve and pre-fill the searched car registration plate and populate details on your form. In other words, the user will get a pre-filled form with vehicle details, such as make, model, year, and fuel type, making the experience much more enjoyable.

“You need Phonexa to squeeze the most revenue out of the calls, to monetize them as well as possible, keep fraud out of the picture, and keep everyone happy on both sides of the equation.” – Evan Weber, an expert in B2C and B2B digital marketing and online advertising, during the Pioneering Pay-Per-Call Excellence webinar

Affiliate Fraud Prevention with Email Verification

Since the email address is usually the first point of contact for web leads, email address verification might be the priority check to implement for all inbound leads. With Phonexa, though, you can choose between three types of email screening, starting from Basic Email Domain Validation to verify that the lead’s email address actually exists, and you can reach out to this customer.

Then, if you need more thorough screening, you can use Email Scoring to get an overarching score of the email address in question, or – if you also want to segregate the acquired emails automatically – you can use Email Validation & Hygiene to divide emails into Valid, Risky, and Toxic.

Email Verification with iClear is arguably the easiest way to prevent affiliate fraud when purchasing leads in bulk or in real time in a competitive market. At the same time, you don’t necessarily have to verify all email addresses at all times. Instead, you can choose to verify a random number of emails or only verify a specific type of email.

Example of Affiliate Fraud Prevention with Email Verification

You’re a large-scale advertiser paying for every qualified insurance quote request, which must include the lead’s name, email, and phone number. One of your affiliates uses disposable email addresses, bots, and recycled spam traps from old lists to trigger payouts by auto-filling your forms.

• Without email verification, you cannot tell which of your affiliates is sending fraudulent leads, while your ESP sees an increase in bounce rates and spam complaints. As a result, you lose reputation, affiliates (including good ones), and may get blacklisted, not to mention losing resources on processing leads that don’t convert. At worst, you may face ICO and PECR-related complaints from customers if they believe they received marketing emails or phone calls without consent.
• With email verification, you can screen every email in real time BEFORE you purchase them, identifying disposable emails, spam traps, bots, role emails (e.g., sales@), etc. Not only can you reject all dubious emails, but you can also identify the source and adjust your affiliate marketing strategy.

Read also: Email Verification to Ensure You Only Get High-Quality Leads

Affiliate Fraud Prevention with IP Verification

For companies offering on-site services – for example, home improvement providers or solar installers – it makes sense to ensure the leads you’re buying are physically reachable, which you can do by using IP Scoring, a comprehensive fraud score of a lead based on over 25 data points.

➥ To pinpoint the lead’s location, you can also use Address Verification, and then you can look for the convergence of these two checks. If both the lead’s IP-derived and, say, phone number-derived locations match, it’s likely a legitimate lead.

Having an IP fraud score for inbound leads makes fraud prevention simple: accept leads with low scores and reject those that exceed the established threshold. All of that can be done automatically in real-time by the lead management software you get as a client with Phonexa.

Example of Affiliate Fraud Prevention with IP Verification

You’re an advertiser running home insurance offers in the United Kingdom. A dishonest affiliate uses private VPNs and proxy IPs to bypass your geo-restrictions. On paper, the lead looks qualified and purchase-ready, with a UK postcode, phone number, and name.

• Without IP Verification, you end up with unreachable phone numbers in your CRM system. None of the attempts to call these leads succeed; your sales rates tank, and you don’t even know which of your affiliates is responsible.
• With IP Verification, you can screen the lead’s IP type, location, reputation, and behaviour to classify it as a residential, mobile business, data centre, proxy, VPN IP, or else. If the lead doesn’t match your qualification criteria, your LMS system within Phonexa rejects it automatically, while you know where this lead came from.

Read also: IP Verification: Paving the Way for Data-Driven Lead Acquisition & Sales

Affiliate Fraud Prevention with Phone Verification

For call-reliant businesses, you can also validate inbound phone calls with:

• Basic phone number validation to check the validity of the caller’s phone number by its format, country, and type (mobile, landline, toll-free, VoIP, etc.)
• Phone line analysis to check whether the mobile phone is switched on, active, and assigned to a specific network

As a result, you can ensure the calls you’re buying or submitting are legitimate customers. For live transfer calls, who also filled out a leadgen form, you can also check whether the phone number that is calling you matches the phone number that was entered on a form.

Affiliate Fraud Prevention Example with Phone Verification

You’re buying high-quality phone numbers for a high-ticket niche, like insurance and mortgages, with payouts of £50 per lead. However, one of your affiliates submits script-generated phone numbers alongside invalid and recycled numbers that will never answer.

• Without phone verification, since all numbers start with 07, you cannot tell legitimate from fake numbers. You pay a hefty price for leads that don’t generate a dime, and you don’t know where these leads are coming from.
• With phone verification, you can identify the carrier (Vodafone, O2, EE, etc.), line type, and whether the phone number exists, is active, and is considered risky. If your fraud prevention mechanisms are triggered, the lead is automatically rejected.

Read also: Phone Number Checker: How to Verify That You Get the Calls You Want

Affiliate Fraud Prevention with Address Verification

Address Verification is a go-to tool for companies seeking leads in their coverage area. In practice, you can retrieve the lead’s location from their IP address or phone number – and you can offer the lead to correct their address at the time of submission or simply reject the lead.

With Address Verification, you can detect all types of fake UK addresses, including simulated addresses that don’t exist, postcodes that don’t match the street name, addresses scraped from online directories, fake new building addresses that don’t exist, reused addresses, as well as leads that reuse the same address over and over again.

Read also: Lead Address Verification & Validation: Your Key to Profitable Traffic

Ensuring Compliance

Last but not least, once you’ve amassed a solid database of leads, you can also screen all leads and phone calls against the records in your instance (the feature is called Lead Stash Lookup – Internal Database, available for free) or in Phonexa’s internal database (the feature is called Lead Stash Lookup – Phonexa Database, available at £0.0001 per unit).

You can also screen leads and phone calls against your Do Not Process List (DNPL) to prevent reaching out to customers who’ve opted out of marketing communication, high-risk leads, duplicate leads, and, if you sell leads, leads from the advertiser’s exclusion list. Using the DNPL Lookup API feature is an important step towards GDPR and PECR compliance.

Take a product tour to see Phonexa’s performance marketing ecosystem in action.

Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Lead Screening with Phonexa

For all available check types in iClear, you can run them while pausing the lead acquisition process (synchronous execution) or without pausing it (asynchronous execution). For example, if you’re buying leads in a competitive market from reliable advertisers, and acquisition speed is of the essence, you might want to go with asynchronous screening. On the other hand, for high-ticket lead acquisition campaigns, you might only want to buy leads after verifying them.

No less importantly, for all types of checks, you can apply them to any percentage of leads and phone calls, or only to those that match certain parameters. For example, you can set up a general rule to verify 50% of all inbound leads while always verifying all leads coming from a source that hasn’t yet proven reliable. Or any other algorithm – you can set up your lead verification and fraud prevention system however you see fit to match your marketing goals.

Look for Convergence for Better Affiliate Fraud Protection

If there’s a failproof fraud prevention strategy, it involves the convergence of several checks. It’s almost impossible that the lead that has passed, say, five different screenings flawlessly, will turn out to be fraudulent in the end. In contrast, such leads are usually purchase-ready and have high conversion rates.

So here’s your strategy: Do the minimum number of screenings to achieve a reasonable level of convergence without draining your budget. For example, sell on-site services like solar panel installation. You might go for IP scoring (£0.0007 per check) and address verification (£0.0005 to £0.02 per check, depending on the type of check), and then look whether the IP-derived location matches the location you’ve got after conducting address verification.

From Affiliate Fraud Prevention to Expansion: Simulating Affiliate Marketing Campaigns

When expansion into new markets, audiences, or traffic sources is on the table, you’d like it to be as safe as possible. Not only do you want to prevent fraud, but you also want to ensure your efforts pay off. That’s where you need Phonexa’s predictive modelling software.

Predictive modelling boils down to running lots of simulations with different parameters until you’ve found the perfect set that you can test in the real market. With Phonexa, such simulations cost nothing, and you can carry out as many of them as you need.

For example, for paid ad campaigns, you test different platforms, audiences, ad types, and timing to see what combinations work best – all based on historical insights into your performance and the input you’re providing to the AI algorithms. As a result of the simulation, you’ll have a data-driven hypothesis of which ads to run where and when, which minimises all types of risks.

 

Take Your Lead Generation & Acquisition Campaigns to the Next Level with Phonexa

Whether you’re buying or selling leads, or you’re in the thick of things as an affiliate network, Phonexa can help you manage all your campaigns from one place without having to juggle between systems and solutions. You get everything you need within one interactive dashboard.

With our eight-in-one lead management software suite, not only are you protected from fraud at all times, but you also know who your best leads are, where they are coming from, and what you can do to get the maximum out of your lead generation or acquisition campaigns. All essential data is right in front of you, so you always have a bird’s-eye view of your business.

At the same time, you can dive much deeper into campaign-level and lead-level data for granular analytics, such as how many times each lead was offered during the period, why some of your calls were rejected, and which lead sources are reliable and which are risky. Phonexa is all about unlocking otherwise unavailable marketing data, so you’ll discover tons of new insights into your traffic and the partners on the other end, all leading to a continuously growing ROI.

 

Here are the two core products you get at a single price:

Here are the six add-ons you get as a client with Phonexa:

Book a demo to learn more about how Phonexa prevents affiliate fraud by providing in-depth insights into leads and phone calls.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the best affiliate fraud prevention measures?

To protect from affiliate marketing fraud, it makes sense to screen your leads across parameters relevant to your specific campaigns and at a reasonable depth. For example, if you’re buying solar installation leads, you might want to check their location to ensure they’re from a serviceable area. If you’re buying email addresses, you might want to validate them to ensure each address is valid and belongs to a real customer.

How effective is affiliate fraud detection software?

There’s no 100% way to detect all affiliate marketing fraud at all times, but you can minimise it to negligible levels by evaluating the convergence of your screening results. For instance, for your most expensive leads, you might want to verify all available data and only accept them if they’ve passed all your screenings. For cheaper leads, less scrupulous screenings might be enough.

How much does it cost to protect your business from affiliate marketing fraud?

The actual cost of running affiliate fraud prevention software depends on the scoring and screening depth you use. As a client with Phonexa, you can access iClear for free, then choose the specific types of checks and where you’d like to run them. For example, IP verification costs £0.0007 per ping, email verification costs £0.0005 to £0.003 per ping depending on the verification type, and compliance lookup costs £0.0005 per lookup.