Affiliate fraud sounds like a machine-learning problem. In practice, most of what a small programme sees is mundane, and rules catch it.
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Self-referral
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An affiliate buys through their own link for the discount, or to claim the commission on a purchase they were making anyway. Blocking it is a check on whether the buyer and the affiliate are the same person, and it ships free.
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Coupon leakage
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An affiliate coupon code ends up on a public deals site. Now every buyer who searches for a discount at checkout credits that affiliate — including the ones who arrived through your own paid ads. Watch for a code whose conversion rate is high but whose click count is near zero.
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Cookie stuffing
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Loading a referral link invisibly so every visitor is tagged without ever seeing the affiliate’s content. The tell is a huge visit count with a conversion rate that looks like your organic baseline.
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Where scoring helps
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Scoring is for the pattern you would only spot by looking at everything at once. It should raise a flag for a human, not block a payout on its own — and if it cannot run, it should approve rather than refuse.
