Affiliate marketing is widely used by companies in different niches: from travel agents to ecommerce giants like Amazon and tech platforms like Shopify. No wonder, as affiliate marketing is a win-win strategy for both affiliates and brands. Brands get better results, while affiliates earn fair commissions.
Everyone benefits – but only when the system is used fairly.
Affiliate fraud refers to deceptive techniques used by affiliate partners who cheat to earn commissions they do not deserve. This threat hasn’t gone away in 2025 – it’s evolved.
Before, affiliate fraud was mostly about basic click farms or fake purchases. Today, it’s far more sophisticated: ad hijacking, cloaked sites, and smart redirects. These tactics are harder to detect and far more damaging forms of ad fraud.
Over 22% of global digital ad spend was lost to ad fraud in 2023, totaling around $84 billion, according to Juniper Research. What’s more, fraudsters are blending in as high-performing affiliates. You see “great” results while partners are quietly stealing from you and inflating costs using affiliate marketing fraud techniques.
This guide breaks down the most common affiliate fraud tactics, how they impact your business, and – most importantly – what you can do to spot and stop them using affiliate fraud prevention strategies.
Modern affiliate fraud tactics and how they avoid detection
Here are the most common tactics used today and how they stay under the radar:
Ad hijacking
Fraudulent affiliates run paid search ads using your brand name, mimicking your official messaging. To the average user, the ad looks like yours – but it’s actually theirs, redirecting traffic through their affiliate link.
To hide the violations, affiliates use geotargeting, dayparting, and IP exclusions to avoid being caught by your own team.
URL hijacking
Scammers register domain names that closely resemble your brand (e.g. brandnmae.com) and funnel visitors through affiliate links.
How do they hide it? The sites are often auto-redirects with no visible content, making them harder to track unless you’re actively scanning for variants.
Website cloaking
This involves showing different content to users and to tracking tools or moderators. A landing page may appear compliant to you – but users see aggressive or misleading content.
Cloaking tools detect bots, IPs, and browser fingerprints, serving “clean” versions only to reviewers – bypassing basic detection systems not built for affiliate fraud prevention.
Trademark abuse
Fraudulent affiliates use your registered brand name in unauthorized ways to hijack traffic and appear as official partners. Violations may take place in domain names, ad copy, or meta descriptions.
To hide it, they often operate from regions with weak enforcement, use lookalike domains, or launch short-term campaigns to avoid detection before takedowns can happen.
Coupon fraud and last-click theft
Fraudsters use fake coupon codes or browser extensions that trigger affiliate cookies seconds before checkout, even when the user came from another channel.
How do they hide it? The theft happens in the final step of the funnel, making it difficult to detect without proper attribution modeling and affiliate fraud detection tools.
Despite all the fraudsters’ efforts to hide the violations, you can still spot that something is wrong with your brand’s advertising. There are eight red flags that indicate affiliate marketing fraud:
- Too many leads from a single traffic source.
- A short time gap between an ad click and the target action.
- Patterned user behavior.
- Different GEOs for the same user.
- Low conversion rates with significant traffic volume.
- Conversion rates at 100% or close to it.
- Suspicious activity at nighttime.
- Users are active for no more than three days.
Learn more about affiliate fraud detection red flags in our in-depth guide.
The hidden business costs of affiliate fraud
Affiliate fraud may seem like just a few lost commissions, but the real damage goes far deeper. Brands that do not stop affiliate abuse may face long-term financial and reputational losses due to unchecked ad fraud.
Let’s see in detail what hidden costs affiliate marketing fraud causes:
Wasted marketing budgets
Fraudulent affiliates often steal your own organic traffic through brand bidding, fake coupon codes, or ad hijacking. Over time, this artificially inflates your cost-per-acquisition (CPA). You pay commissions for your loyal customers instead of attracting new clients.
Skewed analytics data
When scammers manipulate cookies or hijack last-click attribution, your reporting becomes unreliable. As a result, budgets get shifted to channels or affiliates that don’t actually perform, while real value drivers are underfunded or cut.
Damaged brand reputation
Shady affiliates often use misleading ads, fake discount sites, or low-quality landing pages. Customers might not even realize the affiliate was a third party. They leave negative feedback, driving potential clients (and their money) away from your brand.
Higher internal costs
Affiliate fraud forces your team to spend time on damage control: cleaning up tracking issues, handling complaints, auditing conversions, or chasing down bad actors. These hidden labor costs add up fast, and they don’t show up in your monthly performance reports.
This is how untracked affiliate abuse drains the company’s budget and keeps the brand from growth.
Why affiliate fraud goes unnoticed even by great teams
Even the most experienced affiliate managers and marketing teams can miss affiliate fraud. Not because they aren’t skilled, but because modern affiliate marketing fraud is designed to stay hidden.
Today’s fraudulent affiliates use highly targeted tactics like geo-fencing, device filtering, language targeting, and time-based ad rotation. That’s why smart brands rely on affiliate fraud prevention solutions.
Let’s do some math:
- You have about 30 branded search queries.
- You need to check them at least once in two hours, 12 times a day.
- To combat geotargeting, you will do it from at least 3 different geos.
- You need to check the SERPs from 2 search engines.
- Plus, it is better to use 3 different browsers.
30 search queries х 12 times a day х 3 geos х 2 search engines х 3 browser = 6,480
That’s the number of queries that your team needs to cover per day to keep up with the fraudsters. Let’s be honest: it’s not realistic. And that’s exactly what fraudsters count on.
What teams need isn’t more hours; it’s better tools built for real-time affiliate fraud protection. Affiliate fraud detection tools simulate real user behavior, scan global search results from multiple environments, and uncover what human review simply can’t reach.
Smarter monitoring: A reliable way to stop affiliate abuse
Let’s break down how automated monitoring works. Bluepear is fraud-detecting software that protects branded search:
- You set branded keywords for Bluepear to watch in search results.
- The system continuously scans SERPs and flags suspicious placements.
- It mimics real users – switching devices, locations, browsers, and languages – to uncover hidden violations.
- Each finding includes full details: ad text, destination URL, redirect chain, time, and geo.
- Bluepear captures screenshots and logs everything in a clear, actionable report – making it a powerful tool for affiliate fraud protection.
- You get notified the moment a violation is found – no guesswork, no delay.
As you see, automated tools make it a lot easier to spot and stop violations, even the most sophisticated ones. Great news: Bluepear provides a free 7-day trial, so that you can check if the tool meets your needs or not.
Final thoughts
Affiliate fraud is a real and growing threat, even for skilled and well-resourced marketing teams. As fraud tactics become more advanced and harder to detect, ignoring the problem is no longer an option.
The fact that you read this line is already a good sign. Understanding how affiliate scams work is a first step to effective brand protection. Awareness creates clarity, and clarity leads to smarter decisions.
We recommend taking a moment to watch your traffic more closely:
- Consider how transparent your affiliate program really is.
- Think about where automation might help you see what manual checks can’t.
Bluepear is here to help — get a 7-day free trial to see how effective automated monitoring is.
Think about where automation might help you see what manual checks can’t – it’s a key to building solid affiliate fraud protection strategies.