Fraud Management

Fraud is a very important factor when setting up a referral program. Improved fraud detection and reporting allows us to quantify and show all fraud attempts, while simultaneously keeping your referral programs safe.

You can manage your program's fraud rulesby going into the Program Editor and navigating to the Additional Options Page.

Program Editor > Additional Options > Fraud Rules

Types of Referral Fraud

We have a variety of rules set to block different types of fraud. For security purposes, we will not be describing our fraud detection methods for each type of fraud in this article. If you have questions about a specific method of fraud detection found inside your account, please contact support.

1. Self Referrals: This type of fraud occurs when the a member refers themselves. This is the most common type of referral fraud, as self-referrals can get rewarded as both the member and the referral.
2. Duplicate Referrals: This type of fraud occurs when the same person signs up as a referral more than once.
3. Blacklisted Domains: Some domains send spam or low quality traffic or are used solely for the purpose of sharing links/codes. We are able to blacklist specific domains. If you would like to blacklist a certain domain, please get in touch with customer support.

Fraud Detection

Within Referral Rock, you can see the history of all fraud by going to Logs > Fraud Events or by clicking here.

This page gives you detail into which referrals were affected by your fraud rules, and which were allowed or blocked dependent on your rule setup. We suggest reviewing this page periodically to review your fraud rule setup's effectiveness. In addition, if you see multiple fraud attempts from the same user, you are able to warn them or disable their program access.

On your program details page, you will also see a general overview of potential fraud detected within your program.

Fraud FAQs

Why did I get a Referral Add Failure email?

If an incoming referral matched any of your enabled fraud rules, you will receive an email notifying you of the failed attempt. Oftentimes, fraud is blocked by multiple rules, so we suggest checking the fraud detection log in your account for specific details on the attempt.

You can edit who receives these emails by going to Logs > Notifications > Settings under Notification Management.

Will my fraud rules affect testing my program?

Yes. Prior to testing your program, double check that all fraud rules are set to "Allow".

If you don't disable your fraud rules before testing, your test referrals will likely be blocked by our fraud rules.

Be sure to re-enable your fraud rules prior to publicly launching your program!