Promotional offers and loyalty programs are increasingly targeted by fraudsters, and tactics like fake accounts, bot-driven redemptions, referral exploitation, and loyalty point fraud drain marketing budgets, distort campaign performance, and erode customer trust.
Fraud from promotion and loyalty abuse is projected to rise from 31% to 42% of total fraud in the next two years, a 35% increase. Manual-heavy workflows remain the norm, with 79% of organizations citing high labor costs and 96% of loyalty or referral cases still requiring manual review. At the same time, only 20% of organizations enforce promo code restrictions automatically, leaving wide gaps for exploitation.
The priority has shifted. Promotions can drive growth, but unchecked abuse turns them into a liability. Protecting campaigns is now essential to preserving profit and customer trust.
The 2025 Link Index for Promotion and Loyalty Abuse gives finance, marketing, and fraud leaders a clear view of who is solving the real problems. We evaluated leading vendors against buyer criteria such as analytical capabilities, data quality, scalability, and integration. From that review, the strongest vendors stood out for their ability to combine identity verification, AI-driven abuse detection, automated enforcement, and real-time monitoring into unified platforms.
See more: BTC Inc documents over a year of operating bitcoin payments at scale in new BTCPay server case study
