<b>Q: What's the cheapest way to catch affiliate fraud without enterprise tools?</b>

<b>Q: What's the cheapest way to catch affiliate fraud without enterprise tools?</b>

You don't need a fraud vendor on day one. Most early fraud shows up in patterns you can pull from your own reports.

Watch these signals:

— Conversion rate way above the partner's traffic source norm (50% conversion on cold display is fiction)
— Time-to-conversion clustered at seconds, which means cookie stuffing or pre-filled data
— Geo mismatch: clicks from one country, conversions from another
— A partner whose refund/chargeback rate runs 3-4x your program average
— Identical user-agents or IP ranges across 'different' conversions

Set a manual validation hold on any new partner's first 30 days, and review their cohort before you release payment.

Caveat: don't auto-ban on a single flag. Real partners have weird weeks. Pause the payout, ask the partner to explain the traffic source, and judge from there. False accusations cost you good affiliates and your reputation in a small industry.

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