Fraud Detector: Overview & Best Practices

Fraud Detector Overview

It’s no secret that fraudulent activity happens frequently within the influencer sphere. Influencers’ desire to boost their social platforms using shady practices can run the gamut - from purchasing followers, purchasing likes & comments, & participating in engagement pods - all are regular practices that exist within the space.

In order to better understand where each influencer’s fraud risk lies, we introduced our Fraud Detector feature. This feature is able to gauge an influencer’s fraud risk based on two different categories: Followers & Engagements

Within both categories, we give the influencer 1 of 3 fraud ratings that contribute to their overall rating:

• Low (represented by a check mark)
• Medium (represented by a negative sign)
• High (represented by an exclamation point)

To garner an influencer’s follower fraud risk, the system sifts through the influencer’s followers for bot accounts (inactive or fake accounts) and makes a decision based on how many bots are found. For engagement fraud risk, the system sifts through the influencer’s recent likes & comments for an influx of bot accounts.

Once both categories are individually rated, the system assigns the influencer an overall rating based on the average of the two categories’ fraud risk.

NOTE: If an influencer has a medium (or even sometimes high) follower fraud risk, it does not always mean they purchased their followers. As our system is created to flag when an influx of bots are found in an influencer’s follower count, it could simply mean the influencer naturally has a high amount of inactive or “spam” accounts following them.

Fraud Detector Best Practices

Now that we’ve gotten the Fraud Detector overview out of the way, let’s jump into the feature’s best use practices. It might seem kind of obvious at first - automatically reject the campaign applicants that are high fraud risk, manually review the applicants that are medium fraud risk, and keep the applicants that are low fraud risk, right? Not exactly..

The way we engage with an influencer’s fraud risk actually depends on the goals of your campaign. Is your goal awareness? Is your goal conversions? Is your goal purely content creation? Are you aiming for all three? See below for our recommendations based on your goal(s).

• If your goal is Awareness:

• Reject influencers that have a high engagement AND follower fraud risk
• Consider only those with a medium-low fraud risk in both categories 

• If your goal is Conversions:

• Reject influencers with a high engagement fraud risk
• Consider only those with a medium-low engagement fraud risk AND high-low follower fraud risk 

• If your goal is solely Content Creation:

• Consider applicants with ANY fraud risk rating

So, in summary:  influencers with a medium fraud risk can/should still be utilized in campaigns, influencers with a high follower fraud risk can be used if your goal is only content creation, and influencers with a high fraud risk in both categories should be rejected. Happy curating!