Affiliate fraud protection
Commission fraud, click stuffing, and fake conversions steal revenue from legitimate partners and drain your affiliate programme budget. Tapper detects and blocks affiliate fraud, protecting your commissions and the integrity of your programme.
Trusted by leading brands worldwide
Affiliate fraud steals credit and commission from legitimate partners
Affiliate fraud is unique among ad fraud types because it attacks from the inside. Fraudulent actors operating within your affiliate programme generate fake conversions, steal attribution credit from legitimate partners, and extract commission payments for traffic they never genuinely drove. Unlike click fraud on paid search, affiliate fraud is often perpetrated by parties who have accepted your programme terms and been granted access to your tracking infrastructure.
Click stuffing is the most common affiliate fraud technique. Fraudulent affiliates inject tracking cookies onto users' devices, often through hidden iframes or malicious browser extensions, without the user's knowledge or consent. When that user later converts through an organic search, direct visit, or legitimate affiliate referral, the fraudulent affiliate's cookie appears last in the chain and claims the commission. Your legitimate affiliates lose credit for conversions they genuinely drove.
Fake lead and conversion fraud operates at a different level. Organised operations submit fraudulent applications, enquiries, insurance quotes, or sign-up forms through affiliate tracking links to generate Cost Per Lead or Cost Per Acquisition payouts. Your sales team receives contacts that never respond, your pipeline is polluted with junk data, and your affiliate programme's true performance metrics become impossible to calculate. Tapper analyses every conversion claim against behavioural and device signals to identify and reject fraudulent submissions before commissions are paid.
How Tapper protects your Affiliate campaigns
Three steps from connection to clean data, no engineering required.
01
Connect your affiliate tracking platform
Tapper integrates with your affiliate network or in-house tracking setup, monitoring all clicks, leads, and conversions flowing through your programme.
02
Click stuffing and attribution fraud detected instantly
Tapper identifies click stuffing patterns, cookie hijacking attempts, and suspicious conversion timing, flagging fraudulent affiliate traffic before commissions are calculated.
03
Protect your programme integrity and budget
Fraudulent conversions are flagged and rejected before payment. Legitimate affiliates receive accurate credit for the traffic they genuinely drove, maintaining the health of your programme.
The Affiliate fraud numbers
Data from Tapper's platform analysis and published industry research.
10-15%
Average affiliate spend lost to fraud
64%
Of affiliate programmes experience significant fraud
24hrs
Typical delay before fraud detected without protection
Tapper vs Affiliate Network Fraud Detection
See exactly where the gaps are, and why they matter to your bottom line.
Click stuffing detection
Instant behavioural analysis
Rule-based, easily bypassed
Cookie hijacking prevention
Session and attribution path analysis
Limited to network-known techniques
Fake conversion detection
Device and behavioural fingerprinting
Threshold-based alerts
Fraud flagging speed
Under 3 seconds
Daily or weekly batch review
Visitor-level analytics
Full fraud report per conversion
Aggregate programme metrics only
Commission protection
Rejects fraudulent conversions pre-payment
Disputes after payment issued
Cross-channel visibility
Affiliate alongside all paid channels
Affiliate network only
Trusted by industry leaders
See how companies are protecting their ad budgets and improving ROI with Tapper.
“Tapper played a key role in improving the efficiency of Du's performance marketing activity by addressing traffic quality issues within campaigns. Following implementation, Du achieved a 13% reduction in CPA and an 8.6% increase in order rate, demonstrating a clear improvement in conversion quality and overall campaign effectiveness.”
Joseph Elbcherrawy
Client Leadership Director, Mindshare, a WPP Media Brand
“During our Tapper trial for INFINITI, we uncovered low-quality traffic that wasn't visible inside the platforms. Removing it delivered a 14% uplift in conversions and an 11.4% reduction in CPA - a meaningful efficiency gain for INFINITI's 2026 growth plans.”
David Barnes
Data & Technology Lead, Omnicom Group
“With Tapper's protection we were able to identify and block invalid clicks in real time. The impact was immediate as our cost per acquisition dropped by 30% and ROAS improved significantly. More importantly, Tapper gives us the confidence that our campaigns are reaching genuine customers, which makes it truly invaluable.”
Dimitris Bakas
Senior Performance Marketing, Public Group
“We started using Tapper to get better visibility on where our clicks were coming from, and ended up cutting wasted spend by over 12%. The performance uplift was clear, and for the first time, we could trust the numbers we were seeing. It's a total game-changer for campaign integrity.”
Stuart Parkin
Director of Operations, Regit
“Tapper's blocking technology purifies our paid media traffic which roughly equates to a 36x return against its subscription costs. It's certainly one of the easiest-to-implement tools in our entire marketing stack.”
Reno Mindemann
Head of Growth, Kama Capital
“We've been using Tapper for over a year now, and it has become a core part of how we run paid media. Invalid traffic was always something we knew existed but couldn't really act on. Tapper changed that. We're now saving up to $50K per year, and on PureSquare specifically, we saw around a 20% decrease in CPA. Based on these results, we decided to roll it out across other ventures under Disrupt as well.”
Nurkan Kirkan
GTM Consultant / Paid Growth, Disrupt.com
Trusted by leading brands worldwide
How much are you losing to Affiliate fraud?
Use our IVT calculator to estimate your monthly wasted spend, then review the numbers with our team.
Calculate Your Wasted SpendFrequently asked questions
Everything you need to know about Affiliate fraud protection.
Click stuffing, also called cookie stuffing, is when a fraudulent affiliate places tracking cookies on users' browsers without their knowledge, typically through hidden iframes, malicious ads, or browser extensions. When the user later converts through any channel, the fraudulent affiliate's cookie appears as the last touchpoint and claims the commission, even though they played no role in driving the conversion.
Warning signs include: affiliates with very high conversion rates but poor customer lifetime value, high lead volumes but low sales team contact rates, geographic clusters of conversions from unexpected regions, and conversions that happen unusually quickly after clicks. Tapper provides per-affiliate fraud scoring so you can identify problematic partners before paying out fraudulent commissions.
Tapper integrates with major affiliate networks and in-house tracking platforms, including Impact, CJ Affiliate, Rakuten, ShareASale, and custom tracking setups. Our team can advise on the best integration approach for your specific programme structure.
Tapper protects all commission models. For CPA programmes, Tapper verifies conversion quality before commissions are calculated. For CPL programmes, lead submissions are analysed for fraud indicators before entry to your pipeline. For CPI programmes, Tapper integrates with your MMP to identify fraudulent install attribution.
Tapper's dashboard provides detailed evidence for each flagged conversion, including device fingerprints, IP data, behavioural scores, and click path analysis. This documentation can support clawback requests to affiliate networks for fraudulent commissions already paid, though recovery depends on your network's dispute policies.
No. Tapper's false positive rate is below 0.1%, meaning genuine affiliate referrals are correctly attributed and commissions calculated accurately. Legitimate affiliates see no change to their reporting or payouts. The goal is to protect your programme for both you and your genuine partners.
Explore protection for other platforms
Tapper protects your entire ad mix, not just one channel.
Browse fraud types on Affiliate
Each fraud type has its own playbook. See how Tapper stops them all.
Protection by campaign type on Affiliate
Each campaign type attracts different fraud. Tapper handles all of them.
Protection by industry on Affiliate
Ad fraud hits different industries differently. Find yours below.
Protect your Affiliate campaigns today
Join the advertisers who stopped paying for traffic that was never real. Book a demo and we will show you exactly what Tapper blocks on your account.