How does Reditus help with avoiding fraud?

Reditus checks referrals for the signals that most often point to fraud, and the ones you never allow can be rejected automatically. Fraud detection and auto-reject are on every plan.

What Reditus flags

• Same IP address: the affiliate and the referred signup share an IP address, a typical sign of a self-referral.
• Same email: the referral uses the same email address as the affiliate, another sign of a self-signup.
• Google paid ads: the referral came in through a Google ad. Watch this one if your program doesn't allow paid ads.

In practice, most fraud we see is paid-ad fraud, which the paid-ads check and auto-reject already handle. Self-signups are caught by the same-email and same-IP checks.

The same-IP and same-email checks are for your affiliate program. They don't apply to your in-app referral program, because Reditus doesn't always receive that information there. Google paid-ads detection should cover advocates too, marking their referrals from Google ads as potential fraud.

Auto-reject

If you never allow one of these, you don't have to reject referrals one by one. Switch on auto-reject for that signal in your affiliate program settings. Auto-rejected referrals are marked as potential fraud.

Agencies are not fraud

Agencies often sign up and pay on behalf of a client, so the agency and the signup share an IP address. That is normal. If you work with agencies, think twice before you switch on auto-reject for the same IP.

What else protects you

• Affiliates earn when a referral becomes a paying customer. A fake signup earns nothing, and without a referral in Reditus there is no commission.
• A referral belongs to one affiliate. Attribution is last click: if someone clicks two affiliates' links before signing up, the later click gets the referral. Once the person has signed up, the referral stays with that affiliate and is never reassigned, so two affiliates can't both claim the same customer.
• Every Payments API call needs an idempotency key, tied to one transaction, so a commission is never calculated twice.
• Any refund, full or partial, rejects the full commission automatically: a refund in Stripe, and a refund you send to the Payments API refund endpoint. That covers buy-then-refund fraud.
• There is no setting to hold commissions for a set period. For a specific payment, such as a very large commission, Reditus can hold the payout longer by agreement with you, to rule out a refund. Ask us in the chat.

Paid ads and brand bidding

Each program sets its own paid-ads policy, which is shown on your program's landing page. No tool can see inside an affiliate's ad account, so Reditus can't tell which keywords someone bids on, for example your brand name. Rules such as "no bidding on our brand" are yours to enforce, and you can end the partnership with an affiliate who breaks your rules. Partnerships are ended one at a time; there is no bulk option at the moment.