$25,000 saved in commissions
A luxury brand whose affiliate program had been run by an agency for years — leaving the brand itself with little visibility into what its partners were actually doing.
Vertical
Jewellery
Focus
Fraud audit
The problem
Fraud audit
The brand came to me with the question that quietly haunts a lot of affiliate programs: “we have all these publishers driving sales, but we don’t really know how.” Plenty of partners on the report, plenty of revenue attributed to the channel — and no way to tell whether it was creating value or quietly cannibalising it. The brief was simple: find out what’s actually going on, and stop paying for activity that isn’t real.
What I did
What an affiliate fraud audit is
A fraud audit asks whether the sales a program is paying commission on were created by its publishers or claimed by them. I went through every publisher with traffic in the prior twelve months, asking the same three questions of each.
Where does the traffic actually come from?
What does the click-to-conversion pattern look like?
Is any of it incremental, or does the partner only fire at checkout, on customers who had already decided to buy?
Commission savings, annualised
Cost per acquisition
Commission cost of sale
The results
What the audit found
Close to a dozen publishers were showing fraudulent or fraud-adjacent behaviour, most of them flavours of ad hijacking. Two patterns came up again and again.
Coupon and extension hijacking. The customer is already at checkout with a full cart when a browser extension fires an affiliate cookie and takes credit for a sale that was always going to happen. The data signature is a conversion rate no real publisher achieves: 20 to 30 percent, against a genuine content publisher’s 2 to 5.
Fake influencer sub-networks. “Thousands of creators” that are really paid ads bought against the brand’s own name, arbitraging the commission. The signature is the opposite: enormous click volumes converting below 1 percent. Real creator traffic does not behave like that.
What changed
The fraudulent publishers were removed and attributed revenue barely moved, which is the point. The removed partners were not creating sales; they were claiming them.
$25,000 of commission saved a year, cost per acquisition down 21%, and commission cost of sale from 3.9% to 2.7%.
The saving is not just a cost cut. Commission that was leaking to hijackers is now budget for content partnerships, tenancy slots and exclusive offers with the partners who genuinely bring customers in.
Common questions
01
What is coupon and extension hijacking?
02
What conversion rate signals affiliate fraud?
03
What is a fake influencer sub-network?
04
Does removing fraudulent publishers reduce affiliate revenue?
05
