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Fraud Settings

Screen out fraud attempts and self-referrals

Samantha avatar
Written by Samantha
Updated over a week ago

Friendbuy validates all rewards before they are fulfilled to prevent fraud and gaming. With our fraud settings, you can customize which validation rules rewards must pass in order to be valid.

Configure Your Fraud Settings

  1. Navigate to your widget.

  2. Click on the Settings dropdown in the widget menu, then click on Fraud Settings.

  3. Select which settings you'd like to activate for that widget and all its variants.

  4. Save.

Fraud Settings Options for Referral & Sharing Widgets

Browser

Referrals and purchases made by the same browser and session identification will invalidate the reward.

Email Address

Referrals and purchases with the same or similar email addresses will invalidate the reward. You can choose the level of sensitivity for this check. Switching this check to high sensitivity will turn on a more robust pattern matching algorithm and compare the advocate’s and the friend’s email address to prevent gaming.

However, there are some cases where legitimate conversions will be caught by this algorithm and rejected. If you choose to turn on this setting, we highly recommend that you review your reward report regularly to catch any possible mistakes. You can override the rejected rewards and trigger a reward email manually if you discover a rejected conversion that you feel was legitimate.

Customer ID

Referrals and purchases made with matching customer IDs will invalidate the reward.

IP Address

Referrals and purchases made with identical IP addresses will invalidate the reward. Optionally, IP address can be combined with user agent.  We recommend enabling IP address and user agent together.  Using just IP address may result in rejection of legitimate referrals (e.g. conversions made in the same office building or dorm room).

Self Referral Redirect

Referrers who click on their own link will be sent to an alternative URL instead of the campaign destination URL with the friend offer. 

Specify the redirect URL when enabling.

Fraud Settings Options for Email Capture Widgets

Restrict Offer Access to Referrals

Restrict access to your widget's offer if a user has arrived to the Email Capture outside of a direct referral link. This preserves coupon code redemption for Friends following the referral funnel only. This is enabled by default, and recommended when the widget is part of your referral program.

If your business is using Email Capture widget simply to collect email, and distribute offers via coupons to site visitors, simply disable this fraud setting.

Testing Your Conversions

If you're interested in testing the conversion workflow (allowing self-referrals for testing purposes), we have the ability to disable all checks.

  1. Navigate to your widget.

  2. Click on the Settings dropdown in the widget menu, then click on Fraud Settings.

  3. Select the Disable All Checks button.

  4. Save.

⚠️ Be sure to reactivate your fraud settings before your widget goes live.

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