Affiliates Run Ads on Your Brand. AffiliateWP Now Catches It.

A customer searches for your product by name. They were already coming to buy from you. But an affiliate has a Google Ad running on your brand name, so the customer clicks that first, gets tagged with an affiliate link, and lands on your store. The sale happens, and now you owe a commission for a customer you would have gotten anyway.

That’s brand bidding, and it’s just one way affiliates game the system. Self-referrals, fake account farms, cookie stuffing, traffic from banned domains. Affiliate fraud costs the industry $3.4 billion a year (CHEQ, 2022)., and the hardest part isn’t the fraud itself. It’s not knowing it’s happening.

AffiliateWP now catches it. Five fraud detection checks, visible flags across your admin, and a single settings tab to control it all. Just update and configure. No separate plugins to install.

One Settings Tab to Catch Five Types of Fraud

Anti-Fraud is now a dedicated settings tab in AffiliateWP with five fraud detection checks. If you had the Fraud Prevention or Allow Own Referrals addons, your settings have already migrated, and you can remove both.

You control how each check responds using up to three modes:

• Allow: No action taken. Useful for monitoring before you start enforcing.
• Flag: Activity is recorded but marked for your review before payout. You get full visibility into what’s being caught.
• Reject: Activity is blocked entirely. No visit recorded, no referral created. Clean and decisive, but you won’t see individual blocked visits in your admin.

Most checks offer all three modes. The exceptions: Conversion Rate Monitoring uses Allow and Flag (no auto-reject, since unusual rates deserve human review), and IP Velocity Checking uses Require Approval instead of Reject (since it flags accounts, not referrals). Start with Flag mode for any new check to understand your program’s fraud patterns. Once you trust the detection, switch to Reject for automatic enforcement.

Catch Affiliates Running Paid Ads with Your Links

Every PPC-intercepted referral looks legitimate in your admin. You can’t tell the difference between a real referral and one where an affiliate bought a Google Ad on your brand name just by looking at your referrals list.

That’s PPC arbitrage: affiliates buying paid ads to insert themselves into traffic that was already yours. It’s one of the most expensive forms of affiliate fraud because every referral looks legitimate until you check how the visitor actually arrived.

PPC Traffic Detection, new in AffiliateWP, automatically identifies visits originating from paid advertising across 9 platforms:

• Google Ads (gclid, gbraid, wbraid)
• Facebook/Meta (fbclid)
• Microsoft Advertising (msclkid)
• TikTok Ads (ttclid)
• Pinterest, Snapchat, Reddit, Twitter/X, LinkedIn

The system checks landing page URLs, request parameters, and referrer data for platform-specific click identifiers. It also catches UTM-tagged paid traffic (utm_medium values like cpc, ppc, paid, and their variations).

When PPC traffic is detected, AffiliateWP stores the advertising platform and detection method as metadata on the referral. Set PPC Detection to Flag, and you’ll see exactly which platform the affiliate was using when you review the referral.

Available on Pro and Growth Bundle plans.

Stop Fake Account Farms Before They Start

When multiple affiliate accounts register from the same IP address within a short window, that’s a pattern worth investigating. It could be a fraud ring creating fake accounts, bots flooding your registration form, or someone trying to game referral bonuses with manufactured signups.

IP Velocity Checking, new in AffiliateWP, detects this pattern automatically. Configure your threshold (how many registrations trigger an alert) and your time window (how far back to look), and AffiliateWP monitors every new registration against recent history.

The defaults work well for most programs: flag or require approval when 3 or more affiliates register from the same IP within 24 hours. You can adjust the threshold from 2 to 100 and the window from 1 hour to 30 days depending on your program’s needs.

Unlike the other fraud checks which use Allow/Flag/Reject, IP Velocity uses Allow, Flag, and Require Approval. It operates on affiliate accounts, not referrals. If you already have the global “Require Approval” setting enabled for all new affiliates, the Flag option is most useful here since it adds the IP velocity context to accounts that are already pending.

When velocity is exceeded, the affiliate review screen shows a clear warning with how many other accounts share that IP and direct links to each one. If you’ve set the check to Require Approval, the new account is automatically placed in pending status for your manual review.

Available on Pro and Growth Bundle plans. Requires IP Address Logging to be enabled in Settings > Advanced.

See Fraud Happening Across Your Admin

Detection is only useful if you can see what’s happening. AffiliateWP now surfaces fraud flags everywhere you manage your program.

Referrals list: Red flag icons appear next to flagged referral IDs. Hover for a tooltip explaining exactly what triggered the flag, like “PPC Traffic Detected: Google Ads” or “Self-Referral: Email Match.”

Visits list: The same flag indicators on visits that were flagged during tracking, so you can trace fraud back to its source.

Affiliates list: Flag icons next to affiliate names when IP velocity checks have been triggered, making suspicious accounts visible at a glance.

Status badges: Pending and Rejected badges now include hover tooltips with fraud context. You can see at a glance why a referral was held for review or automatically rejected.

When you open a flagged referral for editing, a warning banner at the top provides the full fraud context. You can also manually adjust fraud flags using a dropdown on the edit screen if you need to reclassify or clear a flag after investigation.

Self-Referral Protection You Can Actually Control

AffiliateWP has always caught self-referrals. If a logged-in affiliate clicks their own link or a customer’s email matches an affiliate’s registered or payment email, the self-referral was silently blocked. No referral created, no record in your admin, no way to know it happened. And no way to change the behavior.

Now, self-referral protection lives in the Anti-Fraud tab with three response modes:

• Allow: The referral goes through normally (useful if your program permits self-referrals)
• Flag: The referral is created and processes normally, but a flag icon and tooltip appear in the admin so you can spot it. Awareness without enforcement.
• Reject: The referral is automatically rejected with a tooltip showing the specific reason, like “Self-Referral Detected: Email Match” or “Self-Referral Detected: Logged-In User”

Flag mode is entirely new. You can see which affiliates are attempting to self-refer without blocking the referral. And Reject mode now creates a visible rejected referral with a tooltip showing exactly why it was blocked. Previously, you’d never have known the self-referral happened at all.

Available on all AffiliateWP plans.

Catch Cookie Stuffing and Block Bad Traffic Sources

Conversion Rate Monitoring (Pro): When an affiliate’s conversion rate jumps way above normal, something suspicious is going on. Cookie stuffing and forced clicks artificially inflate conversion numbers, and Conversion Rate Monitoring catches the pattern. Set your acceptable bounds (defaults are 2% minimum, 20% maximum), and AffiliateWP flags new referrals when an affiliate’s rate falls outside those limits after at least 10 referrals.

Referring Site Verification (Pro): Want to make sure affiliate traffic actually comes from the domains your affiliates registered with? Referring Site Verification flags or rejects visits from unregistered sources, catching domain spoofing and unauthorized promotion methods. The system handles subdomains intelligently, so traffic from blog.example.com passes when example.com is registered.

Blocked Referring Sites (All Plans): Keep a blocklist of domains you don’t want affiliate traffic from. Visits from blocklisted domains are blocked entirely. No visit recorded, no referral created.

Getting Started

1. Update AffiliateWP to the latest version
2. Navigate to AffiliateWP > Settings > Anti-Fraud
3. Configure each fraud check with your preferred action: Allow, Flag, or Reject

We recommend starting with Flag mode for any new checks. This lets you see what’s being caught without blocking legitimate activity. Once you’re confident in the detection patterns, switch to Reject for automatic enforcement.

If you were using the Fraud Prevention or Allow Own Referrals addons, your settings have already been migrated. You can deactivate and delete those addons.

Self-Referral Protection and Blocked Referring Sites are available on all plans. PPC Detection, IP Velocity Checking, Conversion Rate Monitoring, and Referring Site Verification require a Pro or Growth Bundle plan.

For detailed setup guidance, visit the Anti-Fraud documentation. For background on the types of affiliate fraud this system catches, see What is Affiliate Fraud?

You’ve been running your affiliate program on trust. Now you can verify.