Let’s be clear: affiliate fraud is happening.
Most of the time, the question isn’t whether there are violations in an affiliate program. The real question is: Can you see them?
Now, fraudsters don’t just break the rules; they hide the violations.
With cloaking, geotargeting, and redirect chains, affiliates can run violating campaigns without ever being caught. Without proper protection and a decloaking system, everything looks fine.
Let’s have a look at the recent statistics:
- Up to 25% of all affiliate traffic is considered fraudulent, and cloaking is now recognized as the fastest-growing vector in affiliate fraud (TrafficGuard).
- Cloaking was detected in 25% of affiliate fraud cases in 2022, rising sharply to 45% by 2024, showing its increasing prevalence in violating affiliate program policies (mFilterIt).
- Geographically, China leads with 60% of affiliate fraud involving cloaking, followed by Russia and CIS at 50%, the U.S. at 40%, and Europe at 35% (mFilterIt).
The numbers show it’s high time to learn more about what affiliate cloaking means for brands and the value of ad decloaking.
In this article, you’ll discover how affiliate cloaking actually works in 2025 and what cloaking detection tools can totally expose what fraudsters hide.
Affiliate cloaking
To tackle this issue effectively, brands first need to understand the meaning of cloaking in the context of affiliate marketing.
The standard cloaking definition involves disguising the true content or destination of a link to bypass ad review processes. In simple terms, it’s a way to show one thing to the user and another to the advertiser or advertising platform.
Cloaking helps affiliates boost their performance and protect their tactics. But often, that advantage comes at the cost of the brand’s trust, traffic, or ad budget.
A clear cloaking definition is essential for separating harmless link masking from tactics that violate program policies. There are two main types:
- Legitimate cloaking is common in affiliate marketing. Affiliates use it to shorten long links, add branding, or protect their affiliate IDs from being stolen.
- For example, instead of showing a messy URL full of tracking codes, they might display a clean branded cloaking link like “yourwebsite.com/deal.” Since it doesn’t harm the brand and improves both appearance and security, this kind of cloaking is often not only allowed but recommended.
- Malicious cloaking is a whole different story. Affiliates use it to deceive ad platforms by showing one version of a page to reviewers and another – often filled with banned or harmful content – to actual users. Without a proper decloaking tool, such tricks can go unnoticed for a long time.
- In practice, this can look like a product review site that shows helpful content to customers, but secretly redirects users to shady offers. Users never see the clean review page. They’re sent to pushy sales or misleading content that boosts the number of leads.
A clear understanding of the cloaking definition allows marketers to spot red flags that traditional analytics tools tend to miss.
Advanced ad hijacking
A brand runs a major advertising campaign to promote a new collection. One of its affiliates secretly inserts its affiliate cloaking link into the redirect chain, without the brand’s knowledge.
A user sees the ad, clicks on it, and expects to land on the brand’s official website. Technically, they do – but the affiliate intercepts the click mid-way, earning credit for a conversion they didn’t drive.
- What Googlebot and auditors see: The ad click appears to go straight to the brand’s official website. Everything looks clean and legitimate on the surface.
- What real users experience: When a user clicks the ad, the request goes through a hidden redirect. This redirect silently adds the affiliate’s ID before sending the user to the brand’s site. It happens in milliseconds, so the user sees no difference.
As a result, the brand loses valuable branded traffic and pays commissions for users who would have landed on the site anyway. Conversions that should’ve been free (from direct or paid ads) now come with unnecessary affiliate costs.
This tactic fits perfectly into the broader cloaking definition: hiding manipulative redirects from platforms while looking legitimate to reviewers.
Content cloaking
This is another form of affiliate fraud that also falls under the cloaking definition, where the visible content is intentionally different from what the user ultimately sees.
Let’s break it down.
An affiliate runs ads using branded search terms to attract users looking for a specific company or product. But instead of promoting the brand’s actual offerings, they secretly push unapproved products and services.
- What Googlebot and auditors see: A clean landing page with neutral content – like a product overview or a general review – that appears safe and brand-aligned. This helps the ad pass moderation without raising flags.
- What real users experience: After clicking the ad, they’re instantly redirected to a low-quality site pushing shady products and fake discounts. The switch happens so fast, there’s no warning – and no ad decloaking.
As a result, the brand risks violating compliance rules and advertising policies. Platforms may suspend their ads or accounts. Even worse, the brand’s name becomes associated with shady or harmful content, leading to reputation damage and loss of user trust.
Why affiliate cloaking is a huge problem in 2025
Affiliate cloaking is smart, fast, and hard to catch. It’s no longer a simple trick.
It’s AI versus AI. Non-compliant partners now use automated systems to bypass checks, avoid detection, and exploit brand ad budgets at scale.
How modern cloaking works:
- It filters out auditors using IP address, geolocation, and browser/device fingerprinting.
- Shows a clean “Safe Page” to bots and ad reviewers.
- Redirects real users to a “Money Page” with aggressive or misleading offers.
- Uses AI to spot review bots and tailor content separately for each traffic type.
Knowing the cloaking meaning means staying in control – spotting the hidden violations that steal brand’s budget and damage its reputation.
Behind every PPC campaign, there are three silent threats that can cost brands far more than they realise – unless ad decloaking is in place:
- Brand hijacking in PPC ads. Non-compliant affiliates run search ads using brand names or keywords. The ads look official but lead to cloaked pages or hidden redirects. Users think the offer is legit, but the brand has no control – creating confusion and loss of trust.
- Redirects to fake coupon or scam pages. Affiliates bait users with “hot” (fake) deals only to send them to unapproved sites – fake coupon portals, shady online stores, even phishing pages. This misuses the brand’s name and puts both reputation and user safety at risk.
- Last-click attribution theft. Some affiliates hijack the user journey right before conversion through hidden redirects or cookie stuffing. They claim credit for sales they didn’t generate – leaving the brand to pay commission on top of its own ad spend.
You might wonder how this kind of fraud slips through platforms like Google Ads. The short answer: it’s built to blend in.
Cloaking tactics are designed to trick users, brands, and platforms.
- Heavy reliance on automation and less manual review. Platforms like Google Ads process millions of ads daily. These systems are designed to catch common policy violations, not advanced fraud tactics like cloaking. If a campaign looks clean on the surface and performs well by standard metrics, the platform won’t perform ad decloaking.
- Traffic looks “clean” on the surface. Fraudsters have learned to mimic normal engagement patterns. Their pages load fast, bounce rates are low, and click-through rates are strong. There are no obvious signs of manipulation because the fraud is happening just out of view.
So, brands can’t rely on advertising platforms for affiliate cloaking detection – they need their own tools to see what’s really happening.
How affiliate cloaking damages your brand
Affiliate cloaking doesn’t just steal money. It creates long-term damage across multiple areas of the business.
Here’s what brands are really losing without proper cloaking detection:
- Wasted ad spend. The users who were already coming through branded search, direct visits, or paid campaigns. Instead of converting for free (or at a lower cost), they get hijacked by an affiliate who inserts themselves into the funnel and claims the credit.
- Skewed analytics. When cloaking links and hijacked traffic flood your reporting tools, your performance data becomes unreliable. That leads to poor optimization decisions, like scaling the wrong campaigns or cutting budgets where they actually work.
- Reputation damage. If users click on an ad with your brand name and land on fake coupon sites, shady supplements, or scammy offers, they don’t blame the affiliate – they blame you and lose trust.
- Compliance risks. If regulators or ad platforms discover that your brand is tied to misleading or policy-violating content, even through an affiliate, you’re still involved. This can lead to suspended ad accounts and legal investigations.
That’s why brands need to use modern, AI-powered cloaking detection tools. It’s the only way to stay ahead of fraudsters and stop them before they cause real damage.
How Rhino Affiliates saved €131K with Bluepear
Rhino Affiliates, a major player in affiliate marketing, faced a costly problem: they were unknowingly paying commissions on traffic that violated their affiliate program rules. Affiliates targeted their branded terms, including “Casino Days,” in paid search using misleading tactics.
The ads looked legitimate but redirected users through affiliate links tied to unauthorized domains falsely promoting an iOS app. In several cases, affiliates used cloaking to hide non-compliant content from ad reviewers while showing completely different pages to users.
Manual review processes failed to detect these violations, especially when cloaking and geotargeting were involved. To address the issue, Rhino implemented Bluepear – an automated monitoring and cloaking detection tool.
During the free trial, Bluepear identified over 100 affiliate violations. The tool successfully decloaked hidden content, surfaced affiliate IDs, and provided clear, actionable evidence.
The results speak for themselves: Rhino disputed €11,000 in commission payments and restored control of its branded search presence. Altogether, Rhino prevented further losses and saved €131,000 in ad spend.
Try Bluepear 7 days for free – see how our decloaking system can help protect your budgets.
How to spot and stop affiliate cloaking
The usual metrics (e.g., CTR, ROAS, CPC) tell an incomplete story. In fact, they can make cloaking harder to detect.
When cloaked campaigns are running, these numbers often look great. Traffic seems cheap, conversions look strong, and everything seems under control. But in reality, affiliates may be manipulating the flow and getting paid for policy-violating traffic.
To catch cloaking, you need more than just analytics.
What actually works:
- Behavioral simulation. You have to mimic real user behavior – clean device, organic click path, no bot signals. Cloakers often detect and block auditor traffic, but not real-looking users.
- Bluepear’s decloaking system automatically checks your SERPs 24/7 by simulating real visits.
- Geographic rotation and proxy testing. Cloaked content is often hidden behind geotargeting. What appears safe in one region might be a scam in another.
- Bluepear runs checks from multiple locations using rotating proxies to uncover the true UX and performs ad decloaking.
- Evidence collection. Detection is only step one, you need proof to act. That includes: logging affiliate IDs, taking screenshots of the “Money Page,” tracing the full redirect chain.
- Bluepear’s decloaking system captures all the needed evidence and compiles a full shareable report.
- Quick action. Once violations are found, brands need fast alerts and a way to respond.
- Bluepear sends real-time alerts via any preferred messenger as soon as a violation is detected.
Bluepear integrates all of these capabilities into one platform, helping brands prevent fraud and control their traffic.
Affiliate fraud has evolved
Tactics like cloaking and ad hijacking are harder to spot and easier to scale, putting brands at real risk. Standard ad platforms aren’t built to catch these abuses, so brands need to take protection and decloaking into their own hands.
Bluepear is built for catching fraud. The tool performs cloaking detection, uncovers hidden redirects, and flags affiliate violations automatically. Get a free 7-day Bluepear trial – uncover cloaked ads and see what others miss.