Q: Real users keep getting scored as bots. Why?

Q: Real users keep getting scored as bots. Why?

A: Nine times out of ten it's the IP, not the human. A fraud score (the 0-100 risk rating a provider assigns each click) spikes hard when traffic arrives from a data-center IP range, a public VPN exit, or a known proxy — even when a genuine person is behind it.

Common self-inflicted versions:

— Your landing page sits behind a corporate VPN during testing, so every internal click looks like data-center traffic.
— You run a server-side redirect or prefetch that fetches the offer URL itself, generating a 'click' from your own host's IP.
— A link-cloaking tool or 'preview' bot in a messenger app opens the URL before the user does.

Fix: check what share of your flagged traffic comes from hosting/ASN ranges versus residential. If it's concentrated in a few autonomous systems, it's infrastructure, not people. Disable prefetch on your redirect, and exclude your own office IPs from the offer entirely.

Short version: bot scores usually accuse the IP. Audit the ASN before you blame the user.

Still stuck? Drop your case in the comments.