Affiliate fraud is no longer the domain of obvious click farms in industrial estates. The new generation of fraud is residential, AI-assisted, and indistinguishable from a real user at the network layer. If your defence is still based on IP blocklists and basic device fingerprinting, you are losing money you do not even see.
At Erin Labs we run a four-layer defence. First, partner vetting — every applicant goes through manual review plus automated reputation scoring across 40 data sources. Second, in-flight scoring on every click and conversion using a model trained on 2 billion historical events. Third, post-attribution validation that compares affiliate-driven cohorts against organic baselines. Fourth, periodic incrementality tests to catch sophisticated fraud that mimics real behaviour.
The result is a fraud rejection rate that hovers around 4-6% on incoming traffic — high enough to catch real abuse, low enough to keep good partners happy. The point is not to drive fraud to zero; it is to make your program economically uninteresting to fraudsters compared to your competitors.
