Case study: FraudScore for Affmy

“FraudScore is a well-known brand on the market, in a sense, it sets the “gold standard” in the traffic quality control for both advertisers and webmasters. As a result of that, FraudScore reports are accepted and trusted by all parties.”

FraudScore solution has been one of the first antifraud tools to appear on the market. For more than three years FraudScore has been known as a leading provider of reliable and transparent technologies that benefit advertisers, affiliates, and networks.

We want to present a case-interview with Affmy CPA network and share our joint success story. Affmy is a long-term FraudScore customer and it gave a thorough and honest review about our solution’s efficiency, reports and our approach to fraud detection.

About the company:

Affmy is an international affiliate network based in Cyprus with a global team, exclusive dating products, and more than 300+ offers for WW GEOs. Affmy’s primary focus is the dating vertical with a global market reach. The company is widely known for an outstanding approach to its webmasters — providing them with their own (in-house) cases and regularly developing new funnels with high CR. Unique solutions are custom-made for each partner and his specific type of traffic.

Margarita Ershova, Affiliate Director, Affmy:

“Affmy is not only a team of professionals, but also a team of like-minded people. You know, we believe in changes. That is why we are constantly in search of the best innovative ways to monetize traffic. It allows us to raise the quality of traffic to a whole new level, and the FraudScore solution helps us in this constant race for quality and high-end service.”

The standard to meet

The team has been working in affiliate business in the international arena for more than 4 years. Affmy CPA Network was established in 2017. During these years, the company had come face to face with various affiliate fraud cases. It had to all come down to finding a solution (either in-house or third-party) that delivered fraud reports and campaign traffic checkups in a format that was accepted by all parties. It was challenging to find an antifraud that satisfied the requirements of the CPA network itself, the advertiser, and the traffic provider. A network must have possessed reliable arguments to explain the rejection of conversions. At the same time, the advertiser needed to protect his budgets against ad fraud. Whereas, the affiliates were taking care of their sources and the reasons that might mark some of the sources as suspicious.

Margarita Ershova, Affiliate Director, Affmy:

“FraudScore allows us to build a case against fraud in 10 minutes. Without the service, a network can wait for an advertiser’s fraud statistics for two days. While waiting for the data, all the parties in the process — affiliate network managers, affiliates, advertisers — are in a very stressful environment. Thus, FraudScore speeds up the process by at least a day and lessens the tension between the partners.”

In August 2019 FraudScore conducted a client-centered research to review the usability, convenience, and the overall statistics reporting approach. It led to a conclusion that the longest period of time is dedicated to breaking the case down for the affiliate and the advertiser. Usually, when a partner is using a specific antifraud system with complex statistics and non-transparent fraud types or reasons — it takes up to several working days for a manager to analyze the case on his own and prepare a report in order to have an informed discussion. The lack of transparency and clarity in these ambiguous scenarios causes an advertiser to have a negative attitude towards his affiliate sources thus straining the relationship with the CPA network.

FraudScore research shows that an affiliate manager spends up to 85% less time on fraud cases when using a comprehensive and customer-oriented API. Moreover, up to 50% less time is spent on comparing numbers of an advertiser’s fraud statistics with a network’s data. This increased efficiency is a great advantage when it comes to investigating, leveraging, and getting more prepared for each case rather than losing valuable time on simple fraud drill downs.

Margarita Ershova, Affiliate Director, Affmy:

“FraudScore is a well-known brand on the market, in a sense, it sets the “gold standard” in the traffic quality control for both advertisers and webmasters. As a result of that, FraudScore reports are accepted and trusted by all parties.

When we’ve started working with FraudScore, our employees had immediately noticed the convenience of using and navigating the interfaces: the design of the system is not only eye-pleasing, but more importantly — all data is displayed transparently and clearly. There are no extra elements and buttons, everything is intuitive and very logical. Even a beginner can easily learn how to use the service. In addition, we highly value the variety of fraud report formats available in the platform. If there is a need to show a report to any of our partners, we can easily download the data in one click in a format that is accepted by the partner.”

The algorithm to follow when fraud is detected

In Affiliate marketing, it is usually a very sensitive issue when ad fraud is detected in one of the sources. It takes a lot of effort not to lose the business-partners’ trust while keeping the budgets safe. According to Affmy, there are always new players coming to the industry and, it might be difficult to identify high-quality traffic sources at first glance. Sometimes even trusted affiliates might get fraudulent sources and it’s the network’s responsibility to alert the partner before the money is lost.

The FraudScore solution is part of a standard business algorithm that Affmy applies for traffic checkups. As soon as fraud is detected — the network notifies the due affiliate and all fraudulent sources are under investigation. In the future, if the partner continues to supply low-quality traffic, business relations are breached.

Margarita Ershova, Affiliate Director, Affmy:

“We use FraudScore on a daily basis to check the traffic of our affiliates, compile conversion reports, and identify unwanted traffic sources. We pay great attention to the traffic quality. The company has special employees who are responsible for constantly checking traffic. Any conversion, any GEO, and any type of traffic — everything is carefully checked and controlled by our managers with the help of the FraudScore platform.”

According to Affmy — FraudScore reports provide the most valuable data — detected fraud reasons and sources IDs. FraudScore extended fraud reasons assist in explaining the affiliate why Affmy considered certain conversions as fraudulent and would not accept them. Sources IDs are used to establish the approach to traffic sources — which are acceptable and which sources shall not be accepted by the network.

Fraud reasons and assigned fraud score with % in all conversionsFraud reasons and assigned fraud score with % in all conversions

Donut report chart for fraud reasonsDonut report chart for fraud reasons

Report for Affiliates and Affiliates subs with assigned fraud scoreReport for Affiliates and Affiliates subs with assigned fraud score

Margarita Ershova, Affiliate Director, Affmy:

“As an example, if an affiliate constantly keeps sending us fraudulent traffic or uses unacceptable source — we have to take action. We compose and send a detailed report on all the conversions with an explanation of why each particular conversion is fraudulent. This would be difficult to implement without the “Extended Fraud Reasons” column, which is, fortunately, provided for us in the FraudScore reports.”

By using FraudScore, Affmy is able to provide advertisers with a higher quality of traffic. An antifraud solution gives an ability to block low quality traffic in time and to save the advertiser’s budgets. Affmy managers rely on the FraudScore statistics to give recommendations to its customers in accordance with the types of campaign and traffic:

Margarita Ershova, Affiliate Director, Affmy:

“In ambiguous cases, we can give the partner a recommendation to add individual IP addresses to the blacklist. As another example, while sending e-mail campaign traffic, we can give a recommendation to focus on certain data centers.”

We’ve asked Affmy to give recommendations to CPA networks in terms of ad fraud and the threats that fraudsters pose to affiliate marketing. Here are several steps that Affmy recommends to take on the path of fighting fraud in CPA:

Margarita Ershova, Affiliate Director, Affmy:

1. Buy and use FraudScore, you won’t regret it :)

2. Organize traffic checkups on a daily basis — it’s vital!

3. We also recommend organizing cross-checks between partners and offers.

4. Set up a system of optional custom alerts — FraudScore gives an opportunity to get a notification every time fraud is detected in different traffic segments.

And an extra advice for our colleagues who deal with traffic from Asia — users from this particular GEO often use VPN, so we recommend that you check the parameters — “device” and “datacenter” in FraudScore — these will help you be certain about the detected fraud.

FraudScore is very grateful to Affmy for such a kind review! We know that fraud in affiliate marketing is one of the major pain points. Fraud is there, in the traffic sources and there is no doubt about that. FraudScore has been working with CPA networks for several years and our account managers are now some of the best experts not only in detecting affiliate fraud, but in assisting networks in arbitrage. We are proud that FraudScore reports and results are recognized and accepted by the industry as the leading standard among the fraud detection tools.

If you want to try FraudScore — feel free to contact us and get a free trial and traffic check up with our team — sales@fraudscore.mobi

  • I recommend to use FraudScore anti fraud solution. It really helps to avoid unnecessary risks and to cut off the fraud at the very beginning. Well done, guys!
    Olga Saburova, Account Manager at MobioNetwork
  • There are lots of manuals about earning money over the internet. Most of them are about making fraudulent mobile installs. As soon as new “manual” comes out we see peaks of low quality traffic. But as soon as we began using FraudScore service we cut managers who were working on checking traffic quality two times. Using their convenient report with set of filters, you can generate different type of reports showing you the traffic quality in different contexts. This helped us to find lots of cheaters and poor quality affiliates.
    Nickolay, CEO at Mobiaff.ru
  • FraudScore’s fraud monitoring system is particularly useful in this regard as it allows daily check on affiliates conversions and indicates the level of fraud detected for each conversion. The fact that the system not only monitors normal desktop traffic, but, also tracks and accurately reports on mobile traffic in relation to Emulators, VPN’s, Bot farms and IP pattern recognition allows us to make informed decisions when reviewing assigned affiliate caps and encouraging more traffic.
    Darren Williamson, Managing Director at CAN
  • FraudScore has easy to handle and fast APIs which permitted us to integrate fraud analysis findings into our own dashboards. Their own interface is very intuitive and offers infinite possibilities in terms of filtering and digging into data. FraudScore team is very receptive to users feedback and continuously introduces improvements to their product.
    Luis Barrague, COO at Headway Digital, Spain
  • For more than two years of working with mobile traffic we have been tried a lot of anti-fraud services offered by the market. Therefore we can confidently say that the truly worthwhile solution is the FraudScore. Strong technologies, convenient interface and the most effective support – it’s all about FraudScore. Since we started collaboration with this service the volume of fraud traffic in Zorka.Network has been almost reduced to zero.
    Oleg Gorelik, Affiliate Director at Zorka.Network
  • Fraudscore has been our first line of defense against measuring questionable traffic. As the mobile digital advertising landscape continually expands, it becomes complex as it relates to user attribution measurement. The need for precise data has never been more important to the success of our business and our clients marketing efforts. FraudScore’s engineers made integration seamless and user friendly. The user interface allows us to interpret the data correctly and in real-time to make the right decisions as it relates to protecting our clients brand integrity. I highly recommend their services.
    Moufid Al-Joundi, Curate Mobile
  • FraudScore has easy to handle APIs which permitted us to integrate fraud analysis findings into our own dashboards. Their own interface is very intuitive and offers infinite possibilities in terms of filtering and digging into data. FraudScore team is very receptive to users feedback and continuously introduces improvements to their product.
    Luis Barrague, HeadWay Digital
  • At Brisk Ads we take drastic measures to combat fraud, and with the help of FraudScore we are able to detect and eliminate any suspicious traffic. With the in-depth reports provided, we are able to identify any questionable sources; making sure that our clients only pay for legit and profitable users.
    Omar Mostafa, Brisk Ads