Determining what is acceptable and what is fraud will depend on your store's policies and how you run your referral program. The good news is ReferralCandy has fraud detection and prevention measures that make it easy for you to view, review and delete fraudulent purchases and referrals.
What is considered fraud?
This can vary from merchant to merchant, but we have found that there’s a distinguishable difference between what most merchants consider acceptable and unacceptable for their referral program. Generally speaking, most merchants consider the following as unacceptable (to name a few):
Self-referrals
Sharing their referral link or coupon on coupon sharing websites such as “RetailMeNot” or coupon browser extensions like “Honey”
Sharing their referral link or coupon on public forums such as “Reddit” or “Quora”
We understand that there are merchants that have no problems with their customers posting links or coupons on forums or coupon sites. We suggest you use the knowledge in this guide to outline a “Terms and Conditions” for your referral program that best suits what your team considers acceptable and unacceptable.
How to check for fraud?
On the ReferralCandy app, go to the Stats & Overview page. Here you will see the Fraud Center section which notifies you when there are any suspicious referrals that require your attention:
Take note of the indicated deadline. If this lapses before you take action, the Advocate will automatically be considered eligible for the reward.
We also notify you of suspicious activity in our weekly suspicious activity report that gets sent to your Admin Email Address indicated here.
We also recommend periodically checking your Top Referrers section at the bottom of the same page:
By default, this will give you a quick overview of which Advocates have the highest total referrals in the last 30 days. You can use this to quickly spot-check if any of your Advocates have a noticeably high amount of referrals you may need to investigate.
If some Advocates stand out considerably from the crowd, it might be worth checking if they are an influencer and are simply sharing with their subscribers/followers, or if they have posted their link on a coupon site, etc.
Using Fraud Center
To review and manage suspicious customers, go to the ReferralCandy Fraud Center page:
From the Stats & Overview page under the Fraud Center section, you can click Review Customers which will redirect you to the Fraud Center page.
You can also find Fraud Center by going to My Store and clicking Fraud Center.
Here, you’ll be shown a full list of all the suspicious activities our system was able to detect.
Click each entry to review. Here you can view the customer's profile, their purchase and referral history, and the reason why the system detected them as suspicious.
We’ve indicated information such as:
What platforms we’ve found the referral link posted on
Where the referral link received the most clicks from
In this example, a lot of the redirects were coming from Facebook so we’d most likely give the Advocate the benefit of the doubt that these are legitimate referrals via social media.
You can use the information on this page to help you decide what action you should take. Once you’re ready, you have three (3) options to choose from:
Yes, it’s fraud - provides options to ban the Advocate and/or view and delete referrals
It’s not fraud - provides an option to mark the Advocate as trusted
I’m not sure - provides an option to contact customer support
Note: Banning an Advocate is irreversible. Once an Advocate is banned, they will not be able to refer friends and their pending rewards will be disqualified. Learn more
Best Practices
Best Practices
There will be instances where we are unable to detect or trace where a referral link or coupon code has been posted or leaked. If you’re unsure about banning an Advocate or voiding referrals, perhaps the following might be worth trying:
Using a search engine (such as Google), you may want to try searching for the Advocate’s unique referral link or friend offer code.
Reach out to the Advocate’s email address. It’s possible the Advocate could be an influencer or blogger that’s simply been sharing the link to their audience.
You can also reach out to our customer success team.
Notes:
Many websites do not index their sites in a way that allows us to scan or search for our referral link and coupon leaks. Our primary goal for fraud management is always to mitigate as much fraud as possible.
Our Fraud Center actively looks for specific, known suspicious behavior, and may not be able to detect other forms of fraudulent behavior.
💬 Need help? Click the chat widget on the right to start a conversation. Learn more