Scaleo Releases State of Affiliate Fraud 2026 Report Analyzing 1 Billion Tracked Clicks

Scaleo has published a new industry report, "State of Affiliate Fraud 2026: What 1B+ Tracked Clicks Reveal Across 500+ Programs," offering a detailed look at how affiliate fraud is changing across performance marketing, SaaS, finance, eCommerce, lead generation, and iGaming.

Full report: https://www.scaleo.ai/affiliate-fraud/

The report draws on aggregated Scaleo platform signals from more than 500 affiliate programs, alongside publicly available industry benchmarks, to show how fraud tactics have shifted from basic click manipulation to organized, infrastructure-driven abuse.

"Affiliate fraud is no longer a line item in the risk register. It's the second business model running inside your program," the report states. Scaleo identifies emulator farms, synthetic identity pipelines, traffic laundering networks, and coordinated multi-accounting rings as some of the patterns now affecting affiliate programs at scale.

The report highlights several recurring fraud patterns observed across Scaleo-tracked programs, including abnormal click-to-registration ratios, suspicious geo-clustering, sub-ID laundering, post-conversion churn velocity, legacy OS and browser fingerprints, and fake or low-quality leads that appear legitimate until revenue reconciliation begins.

A major focus of the research is the growing role of AI-assisted fraud. According to the report, fraudsters are increasingly using automation to mimic realistic user journeys, including session depth, mouse movement, scroll behavior, and reading time patterns. This makes simple click-level checks increasingly unreliable for programs that still depend on delayed audits or surface-level conversion reporting.

The report also gives special attention to iGaming, where affiliate fraud carries higher financial and regulatory risk. Scaleo notes that iGaming operators face layered abuse patterns such as CPA abuse, bonus cycling, multi-accounting rings, stealth arbitrage, brand bidding, prohibited geo traffic, and player journeys engineered to look legitimate until post-bonus NGR is analyzed.

Scaleo's anti-fraud approach, as outlined in the report, focuses on multi-layer scoring across click, session, sub-ID, and conversion quality signals. The platform supports real-time fraud alerts, configurable anti-fraud rules, sub-publisher-level isolation, geo-risk scoring, traffic source restrictions, and post-conversion quality tracking.

About Scaleo
Scaleo is an affiliate management software platform built for performance marketing programs that operate at scale. The platform includes real-time fraud detection, sub-ID level tracking, configurable anti-fraud logic, and conversion quality monitoring across click, session, and conversion layers.

Scaleo Solutions
Přístavu 1585/10, 170 00 Praha 7-Holešovice
Prague, Czech Republic
Press contact: liz@scaleo.io

Scaleo is a cloud-based, high-performance affiliate marketing software designed for tracking, managing, and optimizing affiliate programs, networks, and media buying teams. It is known for its real-time analytics, comprehensive data visualization, and robust fraud detection, making it popular for iGaming and e-commerce. Scaleo is fully white-labeled.

This release was published on openPR.