Risk center

Safeguard your partner program by automatically flagging, reviewing, and resolving suspicious activity.

This feature is only available on Advanced plans and above.

Dub’s Risk Center helps you catch and take action on any potentially fraudulent or compliance activity in your program. We give you the details for each event so you can make the best decision for your program and customers.

The table view contains the following columns:

• Event: The specific unique risk event associated with a partner.
• Partner: The partner associated with the risk event.
• Last Detected: The date and time of the most recent occurrence of this risk event.

Each row is a single event type for a given partner and can contain multiple event occurrences within it. There may be times when you see multiple rows for the same partner, and in this scenario, the partner has been flagged for multiple events that require your review.

Risk event types

Here are the event types you might see flagged and detected in your program.

Duplicate account detected

This partner was flagged by our system for having 2 or more Dub accounts. Please review to prevent abuse of program restrictions, caps, or bonuses.

If the partner is legitimate and has multiple accounts, it’s recommended they merge their accounts to prevent any future issues. If the accounts are not merged, this can be a sign of self-referral, which is when a partner refers themselves to earn commissions or rewards.

Matching customer email

This partner’s email address matches with a customer’s email address in your system. This can be a sign of self-referral, which is when a partner refers themselves to earn commissions or rewards.

Suspicious customer email domain

This partner has referred a customer with an email address that uses a suspicious domain, such as a disposable or temporary email provider. This can be a sign of fraudulent activity, as these types of email addresses are often used to create fake accounts or to hide the identity of the referrer.

Banned referral source

This partner has traffic coming from a referral source that you’ve banned in your risk rules. This can be a violation of your program’s terms if you don’t allow traffic from certain sources, and can also be a sign of fraudulent activity if the partner is running unauthorized ads to generate commissions.

Paid traffic

This partner has traffic coming from paid sources like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc. and can be a violation of your program’s terms. It can also be a sign of fraudulent activity if the partner is running unauthorized ads to generate commissions.

We recommend getting clarification from the partner before banning them from your program. To make this easier, you can click the Request details button to auto-generate a message to the partner.

Click Send when you’re ready to send the message, and then wait for the partner’s response before making a decision on whether to ban or resolve the event.

Cross-program ban

This partner was banned from one-or-more programs on Dub. Our risk team has reviewed this decision and confirmed the fraudulent behavior or terms of service violation.

Reviewing risk events

We recommended reviewing the risk events thoroughly and potentially reaching out to the partner before making a decision.

Click on any table row to open the review panel. When reviewing events, there are three panels of information for each item.

1. Partner information

   This is the partner associated with the event. From this section, you can click to message them or to view their profile.

   
2. Event details

   Here you’ll see the event type, description, and a line item for each flagged event for the same type associated with this partner.

   
3. Associated commissions

   If this partner has any pending commissions, you’ll see the list of all commissions on hold. These are any commissions that have occurred since the flagged event. Learn more here.

   

Resolving risk events

When reviewing events, we recommend taking your time and ensuring a proper investigation is done. This could involve:

1. Viewing multiple partner/customer profiles to verify if they are duplicates/self-referrals.
2. Reviewing your internal sales information for any fraud signals (e.g. via Stripe Radar).
3. Reaching out to the partner in question via our built-in messaging center to get clarification on their referral activity.

Then, once you’ve confirmed the veracity of the reports, you can move on to the next step.

Associated commissions

For commissions that are on hold for this partner, you can perform the following:

• Click Mark all as fraud to mark all commissions on hold as fraud and cancel them.
• You can individually change the commission status to Fraud by clicking the ⋯ button and selecting Edit commission.
• When resolving the event, any commissions not marked as Fraud will move to Pending
• When banning the partner, this will change any On hold commissions to Canceled.

Resolve risk event

If a risk event is deemed to be benign, you can select the Resolve event option to mark the event as safe and keep the partner in your program.

When confirming the decision, you’re able to provide optional additional notes about the steps taken to confirm the details, or any other information.

If you trust this partner completely, you’re also able to Exclude from risk monitoring. When enabled, any future risk events won’t be flagged for this partner. This can be changed anytime in the partner’s advanced settings.

Ban partner

If the risk event turns out to be malicious, you can select the Ban partner option to mark the event as fraudulent and ban the partner from your program.

If the partner has other risk events for review, those events will automatically be resolved as well when the partner is banned.

A reason must also be selected from the following options:

Reason	Definition
Terms of Service Violation	Partner violated your program rules or Dub’s terms of service.
Inappropriate or Offensive Content	Partner associated your brand or program link with harmful, explicit, or inappropriate content.
Artificial Traffic Generation	Partner used bots, fake clicks, or other methods to inflate traffic.
Fraudulent Activity	Partner generated fake clicks, leads, or other tracked actions to earn rewards.
Spam or Misleading Content	Partner used deceptive messaging, false claims, impersonation, or unsolicited promotion.
Brand Abuse or Trademark Violations	Partner misused your brand name, trademarks, or created confusion.

Reporting fraud events

When banning a partner, you may want to report them to Dub for further investigation or a network ban. To do this, click the toggle Flag partner for potential fraud, and provide as much detail as you can about the event.

Our fraud team will review your submission, and if deemed fraudulent, will ban the partner across the entire network and take necessary action to prevent further abuse.

Resolved risk events

To view your resolved events, click the ⋮ dropdown in the top right and select Resolved events.

Click on any of the resolved items to see the event details, who resolved the event, and any additional notes.

Risk rules

We give you the option to customize risk signal detection settings on a program-level, as well as choose which risk event types you want to receive alerts for.

To edit these, click the Risk rules button in the top right.

Paid traffic

If your program doesn’t allow traffic from advertisers, ensure this setting is enabled.

When enabled, it will flag all partner traffic that has been generated from several sources, including:

• Google
• Facebook
• X
• Bing
• LinkedIn
• Reddit
• TikTok

Google campaign IDs whitelist

Add your internal Google Campaign IDs here to prevent your own Google Ads traffic from being flagged as fraudulent and associated with a partner.

Why this matters for Dynamic Search Ads (DSA): If you run DSA campaigns, Google crawls your site and automatically selects landing pages to serve as ads. Sometimes Google indexes pages that already contain affiliate tracking parameters (e.g., ?via=affiliate) from affiliate links being shared around the web.

When these pages are served as ads, the affiliate parameter carries through – making it appear that an affiliate is running unauthorized paid ads when it’s actually your own campaign. Whitelisting your Google Campaign IDs ensures this internal traffic is correctly attributed to you and not flagged as partner fraud.

Referral source

If you want to flag traffic from a specific URL, enable this setting and then add the URLs you wish to monitor.

When adding URLs, you can also use * wildcards to match any part of a domain. These a great when monitoring for a specific page and not all traffic from the specific URL.

Disabling risk settings

If you don’t want to receive alerts for a specific risk event type, you can disable it by toggling the switch to the right of the event type.

When you disable any of the current active settings, you’re also given the option to mark and pending events that match that criteria as “Resolved”.

To do this, check the box labelled “Mark all pending events for this rule as Resolved” in the confirmation modal.