Affiliate fraud can distort attribution, inflate apparent campaign performance, and cause media buyers to make expensive decisions based on contaminated data. This article argues that ad spy tools should be used not only to find winning campaigns, but also as an early-warning system for suspicious activity. It identifies key signals including implausible campaign scale, sudden advertiser disappearances, unusually fast creative recycling, mobile-only activity, and cloned landing pages—and shows how monitoring these patterns can help advertisers avoid modeling their budgets on fraudulent or unsustainable campaigns.
