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As a Incentive site owner you are going to need to deal with fraud or you are not gonna survive very long in this industry. Fraud takes many forms, and they are tough to deal with. Fraud can consist of any of the following:
- Signing up with incorrect information
- Using a proxy to sign up
- Using a prepaid credit card or stolen credit card to complete offers
- Signing up and canceling immediately
- Doing the same offer multiple times
All of the above are considered fraud by most affiliate networks, and if it happens too much you are likely to get kicked out of the affiliate network without getting paid a dime. So, it is in your best interest to minimize fraud. In the long run if you keep your advertisers happy, you will be happy. That should be your motto.
So, How do I go about reducing fraud? Well there are number of things that you can do:
- Do not ever pay with E-Gold (its a haven for fraudsters), even better do not do cash incentive marketing unless you are really on top of Fraud management.
- Institute Phone Verification, you can use Maxmind for this, they charge less than .05 a phone call and this takes away lots of the fraudsters. FSR also has a Telesign verification addon
- Email verification make sure that the user validates their email before they can complete offers.
- Payout less frequently, (I know that it might hurt your signups but most fraudsters go to the instant payout sites, so they have less of a chance to get caught.
- Screen your IPs, only allow users of certain countries to join, again Maxmind can do this pretty well.
- Screen for proxies
- Put a mechanism that doesn’t allow a user to complete an offer twice.
- Be diligent, if someone signs up for every single offer than you know that he is probably defrauding.
- Call every user after they order but before you send the order and have them verify their information. If they can’t do it on the spot ask why.
Here are some more things you can do that will go a long way to stopping fraud, but might not help your bottom line:
- Do not tell the user what he has to do to get credit for the offer, this is important on lead forms.
- Do not tell how much the offer costs, this will discourage people from automatically signing up for the cheapest offers.
- Only payout via check.
Fraud hurts everybody. If you do not keep your eye on fraud you could end up not getting paid at all. If you follow some of these steps you should be well on your way to minimizing fraud.
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