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How does LinkJolt detect affiliate fraud and self-referrals?

LinkJolt uses rule-based checks, not AI. When a tracked sale's customer email matches the affiliate's own, the commission is rejected automatically rather than flagged for your review, and it lands on your Commissions page under Rejected, where you can approve it anyway.

2 min read
Updated Sep 5, 2026

The most common affiliate fraud is self-referral: an affiliate buying through their own link to earn a commission. LinkJolt catches the clearest cases automatically.

How it works

When a tracked sale arrives carrying the customer's email address, LinkJolt compares that email with the one on the affiliate's own account. An exact match, ignoring capitals, is treated as a self-referral.

  • That email comparison is what decides. On sales reported by your payment provider, which is the primary way LinkJolt tracks sales, it is the only signal available.
  • Two different addresses on the same company domain count as a weaker signal. On its own it is never enough to reject a sale, and shared free mail domains like gmail.com are ignored.
  • The IP address and browser recorded at the click are compared too, but only on sales your own site reports through the tracking script, which is the optional alternative to webhook tracking. Neither signal is ever enough to reject a sale by itself.

What happens to a suspected self-referral

It is not held for your review. The commission is recorded as Rejected straight away, so it is not payable.

There is no separate fraud queue and no warning label on the row. It sits on your Commissions page like any other commission, counted in the Rejected total. To list them, open Filter and pick the rejected status.

Reversing it is your call. Open the row and use Approve anyway. LinkJolt asks you to confirm and tells you the sale may have been rejected automatically because the customer's email matched the affiliate's, so the override is a deliberate one.

Where the check cannot run

It needs the customer's email address, so three routes skip it: Paddle, whose transaction webhooks do not carry the payer's email; Apple In-App Purchases, where the notification carries no email and there is no web click; and sales you add by hand, where you are the one recording the sale. On those, as everywhere else, nothing is paid until you approve the commission.

Renewal payments on a subscription are not screened again. Instead, once a sale is rejected, LinkJolt stops creating renewal commissions for that subscription.

This is rule-based detection, not AI. It never blocks the customer's purchase, which has already gone through your own payment provider. LinkJolt only decides what happens to the commission.

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