What is promotion abuse?

Promotion abuse (or promo abuse) is the deliberate exploitation of a businesses promotional offers, discounts, coupon codes, or deals.

Promotion abuse may involve creating multiple fake accounts, using different IP addresses, or leveraging synthetic identities to repeatedly claim benefits.

Fraudsters may also use automated tools to find loopholes in systems, generating or sharing promotional codes across many accounts to amass discounts, rewards, or free items without adhering to the intended one-time or new customer use policy.

Common examples of promotion abuse include:

• Sign-up bonus abuse:  Bad actors create multiple fake or duplicate accounts to repeatedly claim a new customer discount or sign-up bonus.
• Referral  program abuse: Fraudsters use fake accounts or multiple identities to collect rewards for referring “friends” who are actually alternate accounts they control.
• Vouchers and coupon code abuse: Users misuse coupon codes by sharing them widely online or applying them multiple times across different accounts to circumvent one-time-use policies.
• Location restriction circumvention: Users may employ proxy servers or VPNs to access promotions limited to certain countries or regions.

Promotion abuse can result in financial losses by inflating discounts and rewards without generating genuine business.  It undermines the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, distorts performance metrics, and erodes trust in the brand.

Loyal customers may feel deceived if abusers gain more rewards than legitimate users, harming customer retention and brand loyalty. When genuine customers perceive that a promotion is exploited, they may be less likely to participate in promotional programs, reducing the efficacy of marketing tactics designed to attract and retain them.

HUMAN Account Protection helps organizations combat promotion abuse by neutralizing fake accounts created by fraudsters to exploit promotional activity.

Fake accounts are identified with continuous post-login monitoring of activities for unusual and abusive behaviors and automatically mitigated with customizable responses such as freezing the account and flagging it for review.

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