Do you know where your affiliates are really promoting you?

Do you know every channel where your affiliates promote you?

You agreed to pay for traffic from particular websites, apps, social accounts or Telegram channels. Without a declared and checked list of channels for each affiliate, you can’t tell a genuine comparison site from a network of hidden iframes.

You also won’t notice when an affiliate quietly adds a channel you would never have approved.

Do some affiliates refuse to declare channels, saying they’re “just media buyers”?

Media buying can be a legitimate way to send traffic. But many “media buyers” put your ads on websites you would never approve directly: small, low-quality, often fraudulent sites with no responsible gambling messaging at all.

That is why they don’t declare their sources. If they showed you the placements, you would turn them down. Instead you pay lifetime revenue share on traffic you can’t see, and your brand carries the regulatory and reputational risk of ads you never approved.

Do you vet affiliates before you work with them?

Fraudulent affiliates move from operator to operator, often under new names. Checking identity, ownership of the sites they declare, history and traffic sources before activation is far cheaper than recovering revenue share later.

And a good reputation elsewhere proves little. An affiliate with a clean record on big UK brands may be exactly the one running fraud on smaller brands, where it expects nobody to look.

Do you audit every affiliate you pay?

If you only look at affiliates that complain or look odd, you only catch the clumsy ones. Every affiliate earning commission is a payment you should be able to justify.

Do you audit your largest affiliates by revenue?

Big affiliates are often treated as too important to question. But fraud scales: an affiliate claiming your organic players will quickly become one of your biggest.

Your top earners deserve the most scrutiny, not the least. Rank them brand by brand too: an affiliate that looks mid-sized across the group can be the biggest earner on a small brand.

How often do you audit where and how your affiliates promote you?

Fraud techniques change, and an affiliate that was clean at sign-up can change its traffic next month. One-off checks just give fraudsters a schedule to work around.

Do you audit your affiliates on different browsers, devices and countries?

Fraud is targeted. It shows a clean page to your office IP address, a desktop browser and your compliance team, and runs the real technique only for certain players: mobile users, a particular browser, traffic from a certain referrer.

Above all, fraudsters choose which brands to target. The same affiliate can run a spotless campaign for your UK brand and a fraudulent one for your brand in Africa. If you check one brand, from one place, on one device, you see exactly what they want you to see.

Are you only auditing responsible gambling compliance?

Responsible gambling and advertising checks matter. But they only look at what the affiliate chooses to show you: whether a page carries the right warnings and bonus terms.

They don’t tell you whether that page sets cookies in a hidden frame, or whether the affiliate is bidding on your brand. And they never see a media buyer’s undeclared placements, which are often the sites with no responsible gambling messaging at all. Responsible gambling auditing on its own is not enough.