CardCon Panel Offers Insight to Help Mitigate Fraud in Affiliate Programs

Credit card companies aren’t strangers to mitigating fraud. But they may not have much experience in ensuring an affiliate program is safeguarded against deceptive practices.

Managing the risks of fraud in affiliate programs was among the subjects addressed at this year’s CardCon conference, which covered a range of topics of interest to credit card industry insiders.

As the Vice President of Digital Marketing at Credit One Bank, Jon Berger has seen his share of fraudulent activity. He told the audience at CardCon that the industry is involved in a massive game of whack-a-mole in tracking and stopping fraud.

“We see more and more data breaches come out, and they’ll start on a channel or through an application process,” Berger said. “So we’ll put some rules in, and then it goes to another channel and then another.”

Stakeholders in the card industry can be proactive to share information with each other about specific fraud attempts they’ve come across, Berger said. That practice may limit some of the fraud that’s connected to affiliate programs.

Also on the panel was Michelle Lenich, who serves as the GM, Credit Card Marketplace for Experian Consumer Services. Lenich also spoke about the importance of communicating with industry partners when mitigating fraud.

“We have literally shared everything with each other at this point,” Lenich said. “We have shared what fraud tools we’re using, the controls we have in place, and the risk thresholds that we’ve set. And I think together it’s made us a lot stronger.”

Credit card companies that are on the fence about starting an affiliate program should understand that — while they can bring a plethora of benefits — they can introduce challenges as well.

Companies may need to educate internal fraud teams about affiliate marketers and the ecosystems they operate in. Credit card issuers can implement security solutions that help identify fraud on applications they receive, but they need to be careful that they don’t discard applications from legitimate parties.

Berger explained to the CardCon audience that a business’s various internal teams can also establish tests and metrics that help them identify and measure fraud. He said his team was willing to sacrifice its time to set up tests to measure the quality of leads the company received from affiliate programs.

Metrics can help a company’s different departments track the impact of fraud.

“We had to sit down and come up with a metric that was very clear and understandable,” Berger said. “And I think that was what we spent a lot of time figuring out. But, I think that was a core learning experience for us.”

Companies today can leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to help prevent criminals from committing credit card fraud. Berger said AI can also help bad actors find ways to bypass tools intended to block fraud. 

Artificial intelligence stands to evolve over time to further support fraud detection in the affiliate marketing space. CardCon attendees learned that Experian is undergoing an initiative to help AI tools do a better job of assessing different forms of fraud.