5 Best Ways To Keep Referral Programs Secure

Fraud can sweep the ground off your feet and put you under the rug, if not dealt with caution. It can be the biggest nightmare for anyone who’s running an online business. Facing fraudulence can be a challenging deal for you, especially for the referral programs.

Referral programs are meant to up thrust businesses by providing owners the opportunity to put their brand on a much wider exposure. On the contrary, there always going to be certain elements that may want to malfunction your referrals for their own selfish desires.

As they say, “prevention is always better than cure”, it is better to proceed with a caution than to deal with the meddling frauds later. Before proceeding with how to keep your referral programs secure, let’s understand what this sorcery really is.

Understanding a Referral Fraud

It is an endeavor where an entity exterior to you try to breach into your referral program in an unauthorized way.

Here are some examples to look at;

? Creating a phony referral account in order to refer it to themselves.

? Utilizing bot applications to cheat the referral program.

? Focusing on a customer that enrolls for the first time in order to capitalize the reward.

? Registering for an account only to gain a reward and then deleting it immediately.

? Sharing of the referral links of your website on not so secured websites.

There are several ways by which an exterior activity can bring harm to your referral program.

However, a breaching may not bring an immediate harm but in the long run, it does. Here are the ways through which you can prevent a Referral Program Fraudulence.

Maintaining Equilibrium in the Reward Offer

You can be sure that your peers are not going to enroll in a referral program that provides minimal payouts. Nevertheless, offering more than enough for a referral will ultimately going to attract scammers.

There is a catch, however, that you may want to pay attention to. Do not keep the offer too low, for it will keep the users from enrolling in your referral program. Also, never keep the payouts to an extent where it attracts frauds.

You’d rather want to maintain a balance in order to keep your referral program on a healthy pace. Keep it in such a way that your existing peers stay excited and consistent with putting efforts into the program.

The whole point is, as long as your real referrals are reaping good value for their efforts while you are keeping the balance in check – referral fraud may not able to breach into your system. Keeping this crucial aspect into top priority enhances your business and keeps it safe.

Implementing Cookies

Social media has been known to boost your referral traffic in all sense. It does make a whole lot of sense as a few of the successful companies are known to capitalize their referral strength through the influence of the social networking.

Lucrative and fancy it may sound to you, but it does make your referral program vulnerable to referral fraud as well. This is the reason why you must control all types of cookies on your referral website.

Cookies play an important role in the web department. Some track your links and chances are few of them are coming from a fishy source. In simple words, much as a cookie works for the betterment of your website’s existence, it may lead you to a fraudulence as well.

By controlling and mindfully implementing cookies into your referral program, you can prevent a possible fraud from stealing your referrals. It can happen at the same time on one or multiple computers you are dealing with.

Monitoring IP Addresses

More likely than not, the one who’s trying to breach into your referral system may want to give it another shot and that too, from the same computer. No question, the similar attempt from the same computer may not justify a potential fraudulence.

Nonetheless, you may want to put a more than necessary attention if multiple attempts are made from the same IP as it might indicate a hazard. You must flag the IP addresses that make more than one attempt from the same computer as a potential suspect.

One of the best ways to prevent this from happening is by enrolling in services that detect those fraud activities. Their systems are designed to block any suspicious activity that tends to bring harm to your healthy referral program.

These services may want to integrate with your Google AdWords and campaigns that entails the enrollment of Bing Ad. Therefore, the options provided by these services keep an eye on the referral frauds that go undetected by your advertising system.

Offer the Points and Not the Cash

This strategy takes the cake as one of the best tactics to discourage the scammers and to break their spine. By forcing users to redeem their referral points is way better than offering them the cash. The points accumulated can be used for an in-store purchase.

However, the proximate value is still there to legitimate referrers but on the contrary – it deters the confidence of the referral fraud. This methodology is extremely effective in keeping scammers from signing-up for an account and then immediately canceling it after cashing out the points.

It forces all the users to use the reward points to purchase from the in-store inventory. Speaking of which, it does not go well with those who try to breach into your program through a scamming system.

Utilize a Reliable Referral System

One of the best ways to decrease the chances of a referral fraudulence is to rely on a trustworthy referral program. A few trustworthy referral companies have a stronghold against the referral fraud. With that being said, they do everything in their power to protect their peers.

Fighting with a referral fraud does not pose any challenge if you proceed with a proactive approach. Though you cannot annihilate all elements of a fraudulence, you can prevent it to a greater extent.

Referral programs are one of the best ways to generate huge revenues. Where referral companies are making a good time through their referral programs, their users are also reaping good rewards through their services. Security, however, always comes first and hope this article helped you in solving a lot of your queries related to the subject.