HeldSway

Fraud protection

Stop paying commissions on fraud, returns, and self-referrals.

HeldSway scores every conversion against a tunable rule set — self-referral detection, IP-pattern click spam, refund-rate anomalies, coupon-stuffing, and disposable-email signups. Bad conversions are quarantined before they touch the payout queue.

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  • Self-referral detection
  • IP & device fingerprinting
  • Refund-rate anomaly flags

Why this matters

Affiliate fraud is the silent line item nobody catches.

  • A "top affiliate" turns out to be the customer's brother-in-law buying with a coupon code 14 times.
  • 5% of your conversions get refunded within 30 days — and your commissions on those 5% have already been paid out.
  • Click-spam from a single /24 subnet inflates your EPC and your "discovery" partner suddenly looks 10x better than reality.
  • You discover the leak in Q4 when finance reconciles. The clawback conversation with the affiliate goes badly.

What we filter

Six filters that catch the patterns you would not think to look for.

Self-referral detection

Match the conversion's payment email, billing address, and IP against the affiliate's own profile. The brother-in-law trick has a 100% block rate.

IP and device fingerprinting

Flag clusters of clicks from the same /24 subnet, the same device fingerprint, or the same headless browser signature. Adjustable strictness per program.

Refund-rate anomalies

Track refund rates per affiliate. When one trends 3× the program average, HeldSway holds new commissions for review automatically.

Coupon stuffing checks

Detect when a coupon code lands on the cart without a matching click within the attribution window — the classic "I deserve credit" pattern.

Disposable email blocking

Match signup emails against a curated disposable-domain list (Mailinator, GuerrillaMail, 10MinuteMail, plus our own observations).

Audit trail per decision

Every block, hold, and approval is logged with the rule that fired, the score, and the operator who reviewed it. Defensible if an affiliate disputes.

How it works

Tunable, transparent, and reversible.

  1. 01

    Start with the defaults

    HeldSway ships with a sensible default rule set — most teams never need to touch it. Conversions get a fraud score on every event.

  2. 02

    Review the holds queue

    Borderline scores land in a holds queue you review weekly (or never, if you trust the defaults). One-click approve, reject, or always-allow this affiliate.

  3. 03

    Tune as you learn

    Adjust thresholds per program — a luxury brand can be stricter on coupon stuffing; a SaaS program may relax IP clustering. All changes versioned.

More from HeldSway

Find out who is actually delivering.

Run a free trial against your existing program data. HeldSway scores historical conversions and shows you the leak you have been paying for.

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