Every applicant gets the same question: are you who you say you are?
A single bad affiliate costs you chargebacks, brand damage, wasted commission, and regulatory exposure. The Scorecard answers that question against the same data infrastructure used by banks, fraud teams, and KYB providers — so your team doesn't have to build any of it.
The cost of getting this wrong
Directional figures synthesized from publicly reported affiliate-fraud and chargeback studies; your mileage will vary.
They look like a real company. They aren't.
Shell LLCs, fabricated entities, and recycled corporate identities are trivial to spin up and devastating to pay out to. By the time a chargeback or a regulator surfaces them, the money is gone and your compliance team is the one explaining it.
The website is a storefront, not a business.
A polished homepage hides a lot. Parked domains, throwaway infrastructure, missing mail records, and sites already flagged for malware or phishing routinely apply to programs run by teams that only look at the landing page.
The traffic numbers don't match reality.
Inflated reach, purchased followers, and bot-driven sessions look impressive on an application form. They convert badly, charge back aggressively, and quietly drain commission budgets that should be flowing to real partners.
The domain is older than the business behind it.
Aged domains carry trust signals — and a market of brokers sells them precisely so bad actors can borrow that trust. A 12-year-old domain that was parked for 11 of those years is not the legitimate operator it appears to be.
Something changed — and they didn't tell you.
Approval is not a one-time event. Ownership flips, content rewrites, sudden backlink manipulation, and freshly spun-up subdomains all happen after onboarding — and none of them trigger a notification email to the affiliate manager.
They're already on someone's list — just not yours.
Sanctioned parties, prior FTC and state-AG actions, chargeback-ring participants, and spam-ecosystem operators leave fingerprints across dozens of public and private registries. Most affiliate programs check none of them. Regulators assume you checked all of them.
Why this matters to your P&L
Vetting isn't an academic exercise — it's a line item. Every pain above maps directly to a number your finance team already tracks.
We publish the sources we draw from because credibility matters. We don't publish how we weight, sequence, or threshold them — that's the product, and publishing it would only help the people we're built to catch.
Stop guessing who your next affiliate really is.
The Scorecard is in private beta. Tell us about your program and we'll get you set up.