INCENTIVE ABUSE

Stop Promo Abuse and Referral Fraud.

Identify and block abuse in real time while protecting customers' trust. Reward real customers.

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Spot Promo Abuse Before Payout

Stop paying for fake users and fraudulent claims.
Promo abuse, also called discount abuse or coupon abuse, happens when someone exploits a referral, reward, or promo code outside its intended terms. We analyze the entire user journey to detect first-party and coordinated abuse before it drains your marketing budget and you lose trust from genuine customers.

Automate Your Defense in Real-Time

Detect abuse and respond immediately. Use the Rules Engine and built-in mitigation tools to address different levels of risk, including multi-accounting, and adapt policies in real time.

Build a Flexible Promo Policy

Create and instantly backtest adaptive rules. Enforce responses in real time, from intelligent rate limiting to MFA challenges to blocking.

Isolate Abuse with Precision

Build rules with our bot detection software, and hundreds of risk signals, blocking incentive abuse while reducing friction for legitimate users.

Utilize Dynamic Challenges

Replace your clunky, external CAPTCHA. Use our native, invisible, or dynamic challenges to stop coupon scraping or abuse at signup, before it reaches your infrastructure.

Deploy Native MFA

Replace expensive external MFA providers. Use our pull-based SMS authentication and OTP for a more secure verification experience with no added friction.

Investigate Incentive Abuse with a Complete Toolkit

Our analytics, real-time insights, anomaly views, and SOC assistance give your team everything they need to surface any first-party fraud or application abuse. Investigate and validate suspicions.

Understand User Intent

Our real-time fraud detection connects referrals, signups, and promo claims across the user journey to expose threats.

Expose Hidden Threats

Use powerful filtering to isolate campaigns, investigate suspicious sessions, and identify attack patterns.

Leverage Our World-Class SOC

Accelerate investigations and get expert threat analysis with our world-class SOC.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is promo abuse?

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Promo abuse, also called discount abuse or coupon abuse, happens when someone uses a reward, referral, or promo code outside its intended terms. Common patterns include multi-accounting, referral self-dealing, promo stacking, code cracking, and repeated free trials. Left unchecked, promo abuse can drain marketing budgets and undermine trust with legitimate customers.

What is an example of promo abuse?

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Multi-accounting is one example. A person may create multiple accounts to claim a signup discount intended for one customer. Referral self-dealing and repeated free trials apply the same tactic to different rewards.

How do you detect promo abuse?

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hCaptcha Enterprise analyzes risk and intent at signup, redemption, and other relevant points in the user journey. Scores and risk signals can inform customer-defined rules that challenge, rate-limit, or block suspicious activity.

How do you stop promo code abuse?

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Businesses can combine single-use or time-limited codes with real-time risk rules. The hCaptcha Rules Engine can apply a challenge, MFA step-up, rate limit, or block according to the risk and the business policy.

Is promo code abuse illegal?

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Promo code abuse can violate a merchant's terms. Some conduct may also violate civil or criminal law depending on the method and jurisdiction, especially when it involves counterfeit coupons, stolen identities, unauthorized access, or deception.

How does hCaptcha support promo abuse detection with Zero PII?

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hCaptcha Enterprise supports Zero PII deployments that use behavioral, device, network, session, and transaction signals while excluding raw personal identifiers. Customers control the data they send and can pre-blind fields before they reach hCaptcha.