Most brand teams have never had ad-hijacking explained properly — which is exactly why it works. It hides inside healthy-looking affiliate reports, collects commission every month, and never announces itself. Here are the two patterns I find in almost every programme I audit.

Coupon and extension hijacking

The story the publisher tells: "we send shoppers to your site looking for a deal."

The reality: the customer is already at your checkout with a full cart, ready to pay. They open a new tab to search for a coupon code — or they have a browser extension installed. The extension fires an affiliate cookie at the moment of purchase and takes credit for the sale.

You pay commission. The customer was always going to buy.

The data signature is a conversion rate no real publisher achieves. Genuine content publishers convert at 2 to 5 percent. A voucher hijacker shows up at 20 to 30 percent — because they only fire on people who were already at checkout.

Fake influencer subnetworks

The story: "we work with thousands of creators who promote your brand."

The reality: in many cases there is no creator network. The subnetwork is buying paid ads — often against your own brand name — and arbitraging the affiliate commission. Or it's a cookie-stuffing operation dressed up in influencer language.

The signature is the opposite of the first pattern: enormous click volumes with conversion below 1 percent. Real creator traffic doesn't behave like that. A genuine creator with an engaged audience either converts well or doesn't drive much traffic at all. They don't send 5,000 clicks at 1.5 percent.

Why standard reports never show this

Ad-hijacking doesn't appear in a network dashboard. Revenue is attributed, partners look productive, and the programme looks healthy. It only shows up when someone reads click-to-conversion patterns publisher by publisher and asks the uncomfortable question: is this partner creating sales, or intercepting them?

In one recent audit I found close to a dozen publishers exhibiting these patterns. Cutting them reduced commission spend by 34 percent — while revenue held flat and ROAS jumped 41 percent.

Three questions to ask about any publisher

• Can you explain how they drive traffic in one sentence? If not, that's a problem — not always fraud, but always a problem.

• Is their conversion rate plausible for what they claim to do?

• Would you have got the sale anyway? High-revenue publishers are not always good publishers.

If your programme looks great on paper but you're not sure how much of it is real, an audit answers that in weeks — and usually pays for itself.

See this work in practice: 34% less commission, same revenue — a fraud audit case study.