The promotion abuse playbook: seven patterns worth alerting on
Multi-accounting, code scraping, referral loops and more — how abuse actually looks in redemption data, and the rules that catch it early.
Vouchery Team · Published June 11, 2026 · 6 min read
Most promotion abuse is not sophisticated. It is repetition, and repetition is easy to detect once you know what to measure.
Watch for velocity spikes on a single code, clusters of new accounts sharing a payment fingerprint, referral chains that close into loops, and redemptions concentrated in a narrow time window shortly after a code appears publicly.
Pair each signal with a graduated response. Low-confidence signals should throttle rather than block; high-confidence combinations can suspend the code and alert the campaign owner automatically.
The goal is not zero abuse. It is keeping abuse below the margin you budgeted for the campaign, while never blocking a genuine customer at checkout.