A practical look at how advertisers and publishers can reduce invalid events without choking legitimate scale.
Fraud prevention isn’t a switch you can turn on and off. It’s a dial you adjust based on factors like your risk appetite, offer type, seasonality, and partner maturity.
Yet, many teams try to fight fraud by over-blocking or under-blocking traffic. Over-blocking can choke growth and frustrate partners, while underblocking invites waste and disputes.
Real-time predictive scoring can help your team reduce fraud exposure while scaling more confidently. It can mean fewer disputes, clearer partner feedback, and less friction in day-to-day operations.
Why Does It Matter?
Fraud is on the rise. The FTC reported that among people who reported fraud, 38% said they lost money in 2024, up from 27% in 2023. Bureau director Christopher Mufarrige explained that “scammers’ tactics are constantly evolving.” That means your fraud prevention strategy needs to evolve, too.
That’s why we’ve been building real-time risk scoring at dot818 and through our sister company Plat.AI. Our approach relies on a broad set of signals, weighted dynamically, and supports tiered responses depending on how aggressive you want to be.
Real-Time Risk Scoring Tiers
Here are the tiers we use:
Tier A: Essential coverage (minimal disruption)
- Designed to catch the most obvious and confirmed abuse signals.
- Keeps the program flowing while removing the clearest bad events.
Tier B: Enhanced coverage (balanced)
- Adds detection for moderate-risk patterns.
- More protective, with some tradeoff in volume.
Tier C: Maximum coverage (most protective)
- Highest sensitivity, designed for high-risk moments.
- Expect meaningful volume reduction, but you reduce exposure aggressively.
What Real-Time Scoring Solves
Stopping fraud needs to happen before someone accepts the event downstream. Real-time scoring makes that possible through:
- Consistent decisions
- Faster partner feedback (with fewer mystery declines)
- Cleaner reporting and fewer disputes
- Tighter loop between risk and optimization
Simply put, real-time scoring lets you evaluate the event as it enters the system using smart, personalized signals.
What This Means for Advertisers and Publishers
This breaks down differently for advertisers and publishers.
Advertisers get:
- A shared definition of “invalid”, “high-risk”, and “needs review”
- Consistent decisions across sources
- Tunable risk posture without needing to rebuild workflows
- An escalation path that doesn’t take weeks
Publishers get:
- Ability to pass clean source metadata so that good traffic can be recognized as good
- Actionable feedback when something is rejected
- A path to earning higher trust and tiering over time
Protecting the Good Actors
Fraud prevention should reduce risk without treating every partner as guilty by default. The best programs separate:
- Confirmed abuse – these are blocked
- High-risk patterns – these are reviewed or down-routed
- Uncertain edge cases – these are monitored for better understanding
Your fraud program should protect legitimate sources while reducing noise for account managers. That improves program stability while protecting the good actors.
Final Thoughts
If your fraud controls only allow for “on” or “off”, you will either leak money or cap your growth. Having a tiered, real-time approach helps you fine-tune and adjust as conditions change.
At dot818, we help advertisers and publishers run performance programs with real-time filtering, optimization, and fraud controls. All of this is backed by hands-on account management. If you’d like to learn more about how to operationalize fraud defense without sacrificing scale, you can reach us here.
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