Affiliate Fraud Detection and Prevention Tools in TUNE: A User Guide

If you’re a TUNE customer, you already know that data security and privacy are ingrained in our platform and policies. What you may not be aware of is that best-in-class fraud prevention tools are also integrated directly into the platform, enabling you to detect, block, and investigate suspicious activity and bad actors, all in one place. Below, we present a few of the most popular fraud detection and prevention tools available on TUNE.

1. Proactive Fraud Prevention

TUNE’s signature anti-fraud tool suite, Proactive Fraud Prevention is directly integrated into the platform and free to all TUNE customers. It combines the power of Fraudlogix’s ad fraud database with TUNE’s automation capabilities to automatically detect and reject fake clicks and malicious traffic before they cause damage.

How Proactive Fraud Prevention Works

TUNE’s ad fraud database continuously monitors fraud signals such as bots, malware, scripts, spoofed traffic, proxies, and compromised traffic sources. Clicks that match known fraud sources are marked as suspicious, even if they are accepted.

When enabled, Proactive Fraud Prevention rejects clicks that are marked as suspicious in real time. Blocked traffic redirects to a blank page and is excluded from attribution.

TUNE uses the same fraud reason codes as Fraudlogix, although the exact reason is not exposed to partners to prevent reverse engineering by fraudsters. These codes include:

• Non-Human Script
• Bot Generated
• Basic Fraud
• Bad IP Reputation
• Proxy
• Spoofed
• TOR Exit Node
• Data Center
• VPN

Offer-level Override

Proactive Fraud Prevention is a platform-wide fraud filter. For more granular control, you can exclude individual offers from this filter within the offer’s tracking settings.

2. Applicant and Partner Fraud Detection

The TUNE platform comes stocked with multiple systems that automatically protect customers from fake leads and sign-ups and enable them to identify and act on suspicious behavior by individual partners.

Partner Application Vetting

TUNE protects your program from fake leads and bad actors 24/7 by automatically validating every applicant and rejecting those with high-risk scores before they get in. Powered by E-Hawk, this free service minimizes the number of fraudulent profiles created and reduces the manual spam filtering required to review partner applications.

Partner Profile Fraud Monitoring

Partner profile fraud monitoring is available for all customers, but disabled by default. When enabled, this setting calculates a fraud score based on the information in a partner’s profile when they create an account. You select the criteria that will be used to measure fraud and how much weight each should be given when calculating the overall fraud score. For instance, you could select “free email provider” and “1-800 phone number” as your criteria, and set the email provider to count fives times more in the calculation as the phone number. There is also an option to immediately flag any account if it triggers one of your selected criteria, regardless of the overall score.

For a list of all criteria and examples of how weights and scores are calculated, see this help article.

Partner Activity Fraud Monitoring

Partner activity fraud monitoring works similarly to the profile monitoring above, but uses the partner’s activity and/or conversions (versus their profile information) to calculate a daily fraud score. This feature is available only to Enterprise accounts.

Both monitoring systems allow you to inspect and adjust fraud scores for individual partners, as well as set custom thresholds for sending an email alert, flagging a partner, or automatically blocking a partner.

3. Comprehensive Fraud Reporting

There are several reports in TUNE that customers can use to dig into fraud-related data and analyses on the platform.

Traffic Fraud Report

One of TUNE’s preset stats reports, the Traffic Fraud Report visualizes the portions of your click traffic that have been marked as suspicious. This report helps customers quickly understand where fraud may be coming from and its financial impact. It’s an easy way to see the results of Proactive Fraud Prevention.

Partner Fraud Report

If you have enabled profile fraud monitoring and/or activity fraud monitoring on your platform, the Partner Fraud Report provides a quick way for you to view partners with fraud scores or flags on their account.

Time‑to‑Action Report

The Time-to-Action Report shows the lag time between an action (like a click) and the corresponding conversion. You can use this report to help identify partners with atypical conversion timing, which may be a sign of fraud. For example, very quick conversions (under 30 seconds) or very slow ones (after 15 minutes) can indicate ad fraud such as click injection or click spamming.

4. Performance Automation Rules

TUNE’s automation engine helps customers fight bad actors by enforcing compliance and optimizing performance in real time.

Time-to-Action Rules

Time-to-Action rules allow you to automate tasks based on the time it takes for traffic to convert. Set your thresholds based on average time-to-conversion ranges for similar offers and partners, then alert or block traffic that falls outside the expected norms.

Conversion Rate and Profit Margin Rules

These rules allow you to pinpoint metrics like conversion rate or profit margin for optimization or fraud prevention. You can even block traffic down to the specific tracking link for non-compliant behavior, such as incentivized traffic on a non-incent offer.

5. Granular Tracking and Conversion Controls

TUNE’s fraud-fighting tools don’t end with the list above. There are numerous other features and settings in the platform that customers can use to take control of their program and protect against bad actors.

Disabled Tracking Links

Disabled tracking links give you more control when you need to take action against a partner. Instead of completely blocking an account, you can disable individual tracking links for a specified offer and partner combination, leaving the rest to work as normal.

Encrypted Tracking Links

Encrypted tracking links protect your conversion URLs from manipulation by hashing them into a shortened link and rejecting any conversions from non-encrypted URLs.

Advertiser Security Tokens

Advertiser Security Tokens provide an extra layer of protection for your conversion tracking. This feature authenticates every conversion on an offer with the advertiser’s unique token string, preventing bad actors from force-firing postbacks. This feature is available only to Enterprise accounts.

Offer IP Whitelists

Offer whitelists enable you to have full control over the conversions you accept. With this feature, you can list the IP addresses that are allowed to send conversions to an offer, and automatically reject any conversions that come from outside your list.

Sign-Up CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA verification prevents scripts or bots from creating accounts. When enabled, users must successfully complete a CAPTCHA to submit an application.

Summary: TUNE’s Fraud-Fighting Ecosystem

Fraud Prevention Feature	Description
Proactive Fraud Prevention	Automatic fraud identification and blocking via a real-time defensive layer
Partner Vetting	Automatic application vetting, fraud risk scoring and activity monitoring
Reporting	Insight via Traffic Fraud, Partner Fraud, and Time-to-Action reports
Performance Automation	Rule-based blocking, alerts, compliance enforcement, and optimization
Tracking Controls	Platform-wide and per-offer fraud tools and settings

Final Takeaway

TUNE turns fraud management from reactive and manual into a proactive, automated advantage:

• Layered protection: automatic checks on clicks, leads, applications, partners, and conversions
• Operational efficiency: fraud blocking happens without slowing down your program
• Trusted transparency: reports and scores help identify patterns without giving away loopholes
• Secure by default: built-in tools promote clean growth from partner onboarding through payout

If you’re using (or considering) TUNE for affiliate marketing, you get a robust, built-in fraud defense system that covers onboarding, real-time traffic filtering, attribution integrity, automated governance, and reporting transparency, all tailored to preserve both your budget and partner relationships.

Questions? TUNE customers can reach out to their customer success manager or [email protected] for assistance.

If you’re not a TUNE customer, you can request a consultation here or email our team at [email protected] to learn more about our fraud prevention solutions.