As an advertiser at a Fintech business, are you constantly stressed over user growth targets, tight budgets, and campaign performance pressures?
Seeing the results pouring in through affiliate marketing campaigns, but something is still not working in your favor? So, what’s going wrong?
Working with affiliates often feels like the quickest, most scalable, and reliable way to hit those numbers. And to be fair, it works—until it doesn’t. Behind those impressive install numbers hides a different reality—a reality that includes affiliate marketing scams like click spamming, click injection, incentive fraud, etc., which pose significant threats to both the financial integrity of your brand and user trust.
We’ve seen it up close: in our analysis of 196 campaigns across industries, install-level fraud alone accounts for 43% of the total ad fraud detected.
The question that now arises is – Why aren’t the fraud filters built into MMPs catching these? And more importantly, how do you ensure you’re not paying affiliates for users who never actually existed?
This blog breaks it all down. Continue reading further to find the solution – How a full-funnel, validation-first approach strategy can help you protect your growth.
Why Affiliate Programs Matter for Fintech Lending App Marketers?
Fintech lending apps offer instant credit solutions, personal loans, and buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) options to millions of users. With an extensive range of services, these apps rely heavily on affiliate marketing programs as one of the primary acquisition channels to achieve rapid user growth in a highly competitive environment.
Affiliate marketing enables fintech apps to partner with third-party publishers, influencers, and ad networks who promote the app through their owned assets like websites, social media, etc. These programs typically operate on Cost Per Install (CPI) or Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) models, where affiliates are rewarded only when a specific user action, like an app install or registration, is completed. This performance-driven approach makes affiliate marketing an attractive, scalable, and seemingly low-risk strategy for customer acquisition.
To maximize reach and conversion, fintech lending apps frequently run targeted campaigns such as:
· Referral-based promotions with sign-up bonuses for both parties
· Cashback offers upon completing the first transaction or loan disbursal
· Limited-time loan offers marketed through affiliate push channels
· Influencer-driven traffic from content creators in personal finance and credit niches
Therefore, this channel demands substantial investment. According to Juniper Research, the average CPI for fintech apps ranges from $2.50 to $6.00, reflecting the high cost of acquiring quality users.
With large-scale campaigns often spanning multiple geographies, fintech advertisers end up spending millions monthly on affiliate-driven traffic, making them a prime target for sophisticated affiliate fraud schemes that exploit these high-payout campaigns.
What type of Affiliate Fraud Techniques Impact Fintech App Campaigns?
As fintech lending apps continue to scale aggressively through affiliate marketing, they face growing threats from sophisticated fraud techniques designed to exploit CPI and CPA models. These fraudulent activities not only siphon off ad spend but also distort key performance metrics, leading to poor marketing decisions and wasted budgets.
Here are the most prevalent forms of affiliate fraud targeting fintech apps:
– Click Spamming
Click spamming, also known as organic poaching, involves fraudsters bombarding attribution systems with an enormous volume of fake clicks, often generated through malicious apps running in the background on a user’s device. These clicks have no real user intent behind them, but if an install happens later, the fraudulent affiliate is falsely credited. This dilutes attribution accuracy and eats into organic user credit, masking true campaign performance.
– Bot-Generated Installs
Using advanced scripts or emulators, fraudsters deploy bots to simulate real app installs. These bots mimic user behavior to bypass basic fraud detection, but in reality, there is no actual user engagement. This leads to inflated user acquisition numbers and higher CPIs, with no value delivered.
– Click Injection
Click injection is another form of attribution fraud where a malicious app on a user’s device monitors installs and broadcasts. Just before a legitimate app install begins, it injects a fraudulent click to hijack the attribution. This tactic is especially common on Android and gives fraudsters credit for installs they didn’t influence.
– Incentive Fraud
Under an incentive fraud scenario, users are lured to install apps purely for incentives, such as rewards, cashbacks, or gift cards, promoted by deceptive affiliate sources, not the brands. These users have no intention of engaging with the app long-term, resulting in low retention, poor ROI, and skewed user quality metrics.
– Event Spoofing
Sophisticated fraudsters simulate post-install in-app events like loan applications, repayments, or KYC verifications to trick marketers into believing that real engagement has occurred. These spoofed events distort downstream performance metrics and hinder optimization strategies
How to Know if Your App Campaigns are Impacted by Affiliate Fraud?
Together, the above-mentioned tactics form a multi-layered affiliate fraud scam that fintech advertisers must address proactively to protect their marketing investments.
Here are some of the red flags that marketers and app owners should monitor consistently to uncover fraudulent traffic:
– Unusually High Install Volumes with Low Engagement:
A sudden spike in installs without a corresponding increase in logins, KYC completions, or loan applications could indicate click spamming or bot-driven installs.
– Discrepancies Between Reported Installs and Backend Data:
When attribution platforms report high install numbers, but internal app analytics show minimal usage, it’s a strong signal of non-genuine activity.
– High Uninstall Rates:
If users are uninstalling the app within a few hours or days of installation, it often points to incentivized installs or low-quality affiliate traffic with no long-term value.
– Inconsistent Geographic Patterns:
Fraudulent traffic may originate from regions that aren’t part of your target audience or display device language/location mismatches.
When left unaddressed, these red flags erode both financial resources and user trust, two critical pillars for any fintech business.
Why are MMPs not enough to detect Affiliate Fraud in Apps?
Most traditional ad fraud detection solutions in the market are not well-equipped to handle the level of sophistication fraudsters now employ, particularly in high-value verticals like fintech. These solutions are limited in scope and reactive by design, which makes them increasingly ineffective in today’s fraud landscape.
– Reliance on Basic Metrics:
Many conventional tools rely heavily on superficial indicators such as click-through rates (CTR), time-to-install, and device blacklists. These metrics are easy to spoof, especially by fraud networks that specialize in emulating human behavior.
– Lack of Real-Time Visibility:
Traditional systems often operate on post-event analysis, identifying fraud days after the install or event has occurred. This delayed detection not only wastes more budget but also limits the marketer’s ability to take swift action.
– Shallow Attribution Analysis:
Fraud tactics like click injection, event spoofing, and deferred deep linking abuse require deeper, multi-layered attribution audits. Unfortunately, many tools don’t analyze the full user journey or attribution chain, resulting in a high percentage of fraud going undetected.
Given these limitations, relying solely on outdated or one-dimensional tools can create a false sense of security. For fintech lending apps that operate with thin margins and regulatory pressure, a real-time, attribution-aware, and holistic affiliate fraud detection solution is no longer optional – it’s mission-critical.
MMPs Are Hiding the Full Picture from You
Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs) help advertisers attribute app installs to specific campaigns, track user behavior, and optimize marketing spend. Some MMPs also bundle basic ad fraud detection capabilities with their attribution services, offering a seemingly all-in-one solution.
However, this bundled approach often leads to conflicting priorities and shows only half of the picture.
– Focus on Attribution, Not Validation
At their core, MMPs are attribution engines, not fraud validation systems. Their business model is based on the number of attributed installs, meaning they profit more when more installs are tracked. Detecting fraud within these attributed conversions threatens their revenue stream, creating a clear conflict of interest. As a result, MMPs tend to detect only around 10–12% of fraud, while the majority of fraudulent traffic slips through unnoticed, misleading advertisers with inflated performance metrics.
– Limited Scope of Fraud Detection
MMPs typically conduct surface-level fraud checks, such as checking for abnormal click-to-install times or known bot signatures, often missing complex fraud techniques like click injection, event spoofing, advanced bot activity, and device farm manipulations. Their detection capabilities are simply not built for deeper behavioral and device-level analysis that sophisticated fraudsters exploit.
– Lack of Real-Time Fraud Insights
Another major limitation is timing. Most MMPs generate fraud reports on a D+7 basis, meaning if a fraud is detected on the 20th of a month, the advertiser will only receive a report by the 28th. This seven-day delay results in thousands of wasted ad dollars and delayed optimization decisions.
mFilterIt: A Comprehensive Approach to Ad Fraud Detection
To combat the dynamically growing fraud threats of affiliate marketing scams, fintech lending apps require advanced solutions. We at mFilterIt offer a robust solution that addresses these challenges through:
1. Click Integrity:
By scrutinizing the authenticity of each click, Valid8 ensures that only genuine user interactions are attributed, preventing fraudulent claims.
2. Full-Funnel Coverage:
· Pre-install: Detects click farms and spoofed clicks.
· Install: Verifies device and user authenticity.
· Post-install: Detects fake events, incentivized actions, or zero-engagement installs.
3. Real-Time Detection:
Leveraging AI and machine learning, mFilterIt provides immediate insights into fraudulent activities, enabling swift corrective measures.
4. Beyond Monetary Protection:
Beyond safeguarding budgets, we can also help fintech businesses enhance data integrity, ensure accurate performance attribution, and uphold brand reputation.
Final Thoughts
Affiliate fraud continues to be a critical threat for fintech lending apps, draining ad budgets and skewing performance metrics. Traditional tools and MMPs often fall short in detecting sophisticated fraud patterns. Therefore, to protect both revenue and reputation, fintech brands must adopt advanced solutions like Valid8 by mFilterIt that offer full-funnel validation, real-time insights, and attribution-level fraud checks.
Staying proactive is not just a defense – it’s a competitive advantage in an increasingly complex digital ecosystem.
Contact us today to book a demo with our ad fraud detection experts.
