Skip to main content

Promotion abuse prevention

Reduce fraud losses with verified identities

Approve legitimate customers and block bad actors that exploit promotional campaigns, sign-up incentives and loyalty programs.

Book a demo
Man smiling while using his laptop on the sofa

Reduce promotion abuse and increase revenue with verified identities

What is promotion abuse?

Promotion abuse refers to the fraudulent use or receipt of sign-up incentives; referral bonuses and loyalty discounts are most common type of promotion fraud. Retailers, subscription model businesses and hospitality businesses often use these types of incentive campaigns.

Woman investigating on her laptop

Who commits promotion abuse?

There are global criminal enterprises that specialize in promotion abuse, creating realistic counterfeit coupons or opening new accounts using stolen or synthetic identities. However, most promotion abuse is committed by consumers who may sign up repeatedly using burner email addresses or use services free of charge by acquiring sequential free trials through a series of fake accounts.

Two women discussing while looking at a computer screen

Why preventing promotion abuse is important

By enabling bad actors to abuse promotions, businesses leave themselves vulnerable to distorted acquisition metrics, wasted marketing budgets and depleted inventory. Through promotion abuse prevention, you not only reduce serious financial losses, but you will also increase ROI on your campaigns and boost overall profitability.

Woman using a calculator

How promo abuse happens

Identities are manually reviewed

A manual review agent steps in to investigate, reviewing identity elements behind the transaction.

Identity icon depincting an ID badge

Review queues fill up

When there is no clear decision on the legitimacy of a transaction review queues fill up.

Information tooltip icon

Fraud is determined manually

The manual review agent makes a decision on whether or not the fraud has occurred.

Magnifying glass investigation icon

Mastercard Identity solutions

Onboard more customers with confidence and lower friction while preventing fraud from entering your platform. 

Identity Insights for Accounts

Optimize customer onboarding with dynamic identity data to assess risk and convert.

Learn more
Woman paying on line on her laptop

Improved customer satisfaction

Allow agents to see customer data and the linkages between elements to quickly and confidently approve more good customers.

Increased agent productivity

Save substantial search time and enable agents to approve good orders quickly through our single-search capability.

Fight fraudulent orders

With our machine learning-powered network that adapts to fraud patterns, arm your agents with evolving insights to identify fraud.

Book a demo

Request a personalized demo to learn how Mastercard can enhance your business through our products and services.

Book a demo
Mastercard

Related blogs

Results