Fraud poses a significant challenge in the rewarded offer and affiliate space. Fraudsters exploit tracking gaps to generate fake conversions, inflate metrics, and drain marketing budgets. At GoKart, we believe the most effective defense is at the conversion event level, where you can distinguish real users from noise without blocking legitimate traffic.
Here are key strategies we recommend, along with how GoKart helps you put them into practice.
Trust Your Sources
IP Whitelisting
Securing conversions starts with knowing whom to trust. By whitelisting postback IPs, you ensure that only recognized Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs) or upstream tracking platforms can trigger conversions. This prevents fraudulent servers and unauthorized traffic from slipping through.
Keep Endpoints Obscure
Signed Postbacks
Fraudsters often attempt to fabricate or force fire conversions by reverse-engineering postback URLs. GoKart employs signed, obfuscated postbacks, making it difficult for attackers to guess or replay them. While no signature is foolproof, combining it with whitelisting and sequencing rules significantly enhances the security of your conversion pipeline.
Buy Yourself Time
Reward Delay
Instant rewards create easy opportunities for fraudsters. Introducing a short delay before crediting a user allows you to identify suspicious patterns, like sudden spikes in installs, before they result in payouts. GoKart enables you to hold rewards just long enough to protect your bottom line without compromising user experience.
Look for Realistic Journeys
Event Sequencing + Timing
Real users follow natural flows: install, register, purchase. Fraudulent activity rarely mirrors this pattern. By verifying that events occur in the correct order and with realistic time gaps, you can filter out bots that trigger everything simultaneously. GoKart automates these checks.
Respect Geo Targets
Geo Approval
If a campaign targets the US, a surge of conversions from distant locations is a clear warning sign. Enforcing geo checks at the conversion level aligns traffic with campaign goals and prevents wasted spending on users outside your target audience.
Don’t Rely on IP Reputation Alone
Many platforms depend heavily on IP reputation databases, blocking entire ranges previously linked to fraud. The issue? IPs are recycled. A “bad” IP yesterday may belong to a legitimate user today. Overly aggressive blocking risks losing real conversions and negatively impacting revenue.
Instead, GoKart emphasizes conversion-level signals that reflect genuine behavior. This layered approach minimizes false positives and maintains clean traffic without excluding good users.
Reduce Noise Early
Iframe Bot Protection
When traffic passes through our Offer Wall iframe, we automatically filter out obvious bots at the click level. This results in fewer junk clicks to process, less wasted postbacks, and cleaner data for both publishers and advertisers.
Closing Thoughts
Fraudsters will continually test the limits of your system. The solution lies not just in adding more blocklists, but in implementing smarter checks at the conversion event level.
At GoKart, we provide tools that enable you to trust your sources, validate user journeys, enforce geo targeting, and secure your postbacks, all without hindering legitimate traffic. Our goal is not only to stop fraud but also to help publishers and advertisers run cleaner, more profitable programs in the rewarded offer space.
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