Prevent & Monitor Creator Fraud

Preventing creator fraud starts with identifying common types of suspicious activity and requires both diligent manual vetting and consistent automated monitoring.

Common creator fraud types

Creator fraud can take a few different forms. Here are three common patterns to watch out for:

Fraud type	Creator activity
Invalid traffic	Bot clicks, pixel stuffing, and forced views that manipulate attribution.
Financial fraud	High transaction reversal rates, suspicious bulk orders, and chargeback scams.
Compliance violations	Unauthorized use of promo codes or brand bidding on proprietary search terms.

Follow the three-step process below to protect your program from these types of fraud.

1

Vet & onboard creators

This step outlines the vetting process for new creators. You can use the Seven C's of Brand Safety as a simple checklist to guide this qualitative review, supported by audience authenticity signals and historical risk data from impact.com.

1. Content

Review the quality and relevance of the creator's posts.

• Action: Go to [Engage] → Content → User Generated → User Generated Content to audit historical and active posts.

• Verify: Confirm that the posts maintain a consistent theme and that the content's tone and subject matter align with your brand's values and safety guidelines.

2. Characteristics

Confirm the creator’s identity, niche, and professional persona.

• Action: Review the About and Media Properties sections of their creator profile.

• Verify: Cross-reference this information with their live content to ensure consistency.

3. Controversies

Review the creator's posts and web placements for potential brand safety issues or policy violations.

• Action: Set up monitoring policies (keywords / mentions + unapproved terms + brand safety categories).

• Verify: Review flagged monitoring results and create violations when needed.

4. Community

Assess audience authenticity and monitor for risk indicators.

• Action: Go to [Discover] → Find Partners → Creator Search to locate the creator and open their profile. See Find Creators with Creator Search.

• Verify: Review the creator's Engagement Rate and Creator's Country to check for risk indicators like unusual follower growth or a mismatched audience geography.

5. Customers

Ensure the creator’s audience aligns with your campaign’s target customer.

• Action: In the Creator Profile, review the Reached Audience data.

• Verify: Confirm the audience demographics align with your campaign’s Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

6. Competitors

Identify potential brand conflicts by reviewing a creator's partnership history.

• Action: Review the creator's past sponsored posts on their primary social media channels and blog.

• Verify: Cross-reference the brands they have worked with against your company's official competitor list to flag any conflicts of interest.

7. Compliance

Validate that creators include required sponsorship disclosures in posts.

• Action: Create a social monitoring policy using the Disclosure Verification feature to check for required hashtags (e.g., #ad). See Create a Social Monitoring Policy.

• Verify: Review posts flagged by the policy and take appropriate action using the policy’s automations.

2

Establish clear terms & conditions

Protect your program with a clear contract before onboarding any creator. Your agreement must define what constitutes fraudulent behavior and clearly state your right to terminate the partnership and recover commissions if those terms are violated. For more details, refer to the Methods to Prevent Bad Acting for Brands article.

3

Monitor & audit conversions

After a creator is onboarded, the process shifts to a continuous cycle of monitoring. This involves using the automated Event Risk service, followed by manual reviews of key reports.

The Event Risk service protects your program by scoring all clicks and conversions for suspicious, non-human activity and categorizing each event as Critical, High Risk, or Suspect. It uses two key functions:

• Click Filtering (Protecting Metrics): Since clicks are the most vulnerable events to invalid traffic, this function protects the integrity of your performance metrics (e.g., CPC and CTR) and prevents unwanted CPC payouts by automatically filtering clicks identified as Critical.

• Action-Level Scoring (Protecting Spend): This function automatically rejects actions with critical risk signals. If you believe they are legitimate, you must review them in [Engage] → Transactions → Pending Payouts → At Risk and explicitly approve them to make them payable. See Review at Risk Actions.

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Key Performance Indicators (KPI's)

These KPIs should be central to your reporting, supported by clear thresholds that indicate potential red flags.

KPI	Description
Reversal Rate	(Cancelled Actions / Total Actions) Indicates financial quality fraud like bulk ordering to hit commission tiers or coupon abuse.
Conversion Rate (CVR)	(Conversions / Total Clicks) A suspiciously high CVR can signal cookie stuffing or click manipulation.
AOV Deviation	Creator's Average Order Value (AOV) vs. Program Average Identifies creators engaged in transaction abuse, like repeatedly buying the minimum required for commission.
Fraud Rate	(Actions Flagged by Risk Service / Total Actions) The primary measure of program integrity, identifying bot activity or traffic anomalies.
Traffic Source Integrity	Percentage of traffic from suspicious IPs, VPNs, or misaligned geo-regions. Confirms creator audience authenticity and compliance with geo-targeting rules.