Fraud Protection
FirstPromoter includes multiple safeguards to protect your affiliate program from fraud. This article covers the promoter settings and fraud protection tools you can use to prevent commission abuse, self-referrals, referrals coming from paid ads and handling refunds or chargebacks.
You can access your fraud protection settings by going to "Settings" - "Others" tab and locate "Fraud Protection"
By enabling the reCAPTCHA feature, you can filter the bots or fake registrations on your promoter sign-up form;
For security reasons, you can set a maximum amount for automatic approval to ensure that no fraudulent charges are rewarded. Any amount higher than the specified limit will require manual review and approval.
When enabled, affiliates must verify their email before updating their payout method. This helps prevent unauthorized payout changes and reduces the risk of fraud.
Referral Fraud Detection:
FirstPromoter automatically tracks self-referrals (when a promoter refers themselves - same email or same IP) and referrals that originate from paid advertising channels (e.g., Google, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Meta, Tiktok, Microsoft, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, Taboola).
You can go to Referrals → Use the filter option → Fraud check, to easily filter for both self-referred or ad source referrals.
Referrals that come from paid ads or are self-referred, will show a warning icon:
Note: If you hover over the warning icon, it will specify if the referral is self-referred or if it comes from a paid ad.
You can choose how to handle traffic from paid ads by adjusting your campaign settings:
Go to Campaigns → Edit campaign → Main settings tab
Click Show more options
From there, tweak how referrals from paid traffic are handled (e.g., automatically approve, mark for review, or exclude commissions):
You can also set this for a specific promoter, not just the entire campaign. This is useful when you want to apply a different rule for a single promoter, for example allowing paid ad traffic only for a trusted partner.
There are two ways to access it:
Go to Promoters, search for the promoter, click the three dots on the right of their row, then select Configure Ad Traffic.
Or open the promoter's profile, click the three dots next to the Impersonate and edit buttons at the top right, then select Configure Ad Traffic.
You'll see four options:
Allow: track ad clicks and commissions.
Pending commissions: track ad clicks but keep commissions as pending.
Block: block ad clicks and don't generate commissions.
Same as Campaign: reset to the campaign's default ad traffic setting.
Note: This setting overrides the campaign-level rule for that promoter only.
Commissions Fraud Detection:
FirstPromoter automatically tracks refunds and chargebacks and applies them as negative commissions to the affiliate’s earnings, so you don’t overpay affiliates for transactions that were reversed. (Refunds and negative commission are generated whenever a refund or chargeback event is tracked on your billing provider or API.) This is an example of how a refunds looks like in the Commissions section:
