Use case · Advertising, marketing & DSP's
Affiliate Fraud Detection
Affiliate payouts create a direct financial incentive to manufacture volume. Fraudulent affiliates route sophisticated bot traffic through residential proxies specifically to fake geographic spread and evade the simple checks most networks run.
Why simple checks miss it
Quick answer
Affiliate fraud detection identifies clicks, leads and conversions manufactured to inflate payouts rather than generated by real customer interest, by analysing the IP behind each event for bot signatures, residential proxy use, and geographic inconsistency with the affiliate's claimed audience.
Every other type of ad fraud is opportunistic. Affiliate fraud is structural — the payout is the entire business model for the fraudulent affiliate, which means the incentive to invest in evasion scales directly with how much money is at stake. That's why affiliate fraud rings have moved well past the obvious signals: duplicate IPs, impossible click frequency, or datacenter origin.
What they invest in instead is looking exactly like a real, geographically-plausible customer — residential proxies to place the traffic in the right country, and bots sophisticated enough to pass whatever simple validation the network already runs. A network checking only for duplicates or datacenter IPs will miss this traffic entirely.
How IP Raccoon helps
Detected bot category and anonymiser status are the signals that actually differentiate here, because sophisticated affiliate fraud is specifically engineered to defeat simpler checks:
Bot category
Beyond simple/obvious bots
Distinguishes basic scripted traffic from sophisticated, behaviourally-realistic bots built specifically to pass the validation most affiliate networks already run.
Anonymiser status
Residential proxy identification
Flags residential proxy networks even when the IP's claimed location matches the affiliate's audience perfectly — geographic plausibility alone isn't evidence of a real customer.
The underlying data has a specific advantage here: it's fed by real advertising and affiliate traffic from the Opticks fraud detection network, not just a generic IP registry, which means the bot and proxy categories are shaped by what affiliate fraud actually looks like in practice.
Where this shows up
Performance marketing
Cost-per-action and cost-per-lead affiliate programmes, where every fraudulent conversion is a direct payout.
iGaming affiliate programmes
High per-player payouts sharpen the same incentive — fraudulent player referrals are filtered with the same bot and proxy signals before commission is paid.
Lead generation
High-CPL verticals (insurance, finance, legal) where a single fraudulent lead can be worth pursuing at scale for a fraud ring.
What to look for in an affiliate fraud signal
- Bot sophistication level, not just a bot/not-bot flag — simple and behaviourally-realistic bots need different confidence thresholds
- Residential proxy detection specifically, since that's the infrastructure built to defeat geographic and IP-reputation checks
- Real-time scoring so fraudulent conversions can be flagged before commission is paid out, not after
- Detection built on real advertising-fraud traffic, not a generic IP database
$ curl 'https://api.ipraccoon.com/ip/198.51.100.23' \
-H "Authorization: $IP_RACCOON_TOKEN"
{
"ip": "198.51.100.23",
"risks": {
"anonymizers": "proxy",
"detected_bots": "sophisticated_bot"
}
}See how much of your affiliate traffic is real
Score your affiliate clicks and conversions with IP Raccoon before the next payout run.
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