Website is getting fraudulent traffic

Hello,

We are able to detect if traffic is a VPN, Tor, Relay, Hosting, or Proxy.

I am trying to block/redirect the fraudulent traffic. Which one of those 5 factors should I block?

I obviously know that I don't want to block VPN, but what else?
(The goal is to improve our cpm with our ad networks, they don't want fake/bot traffic)

block traffic from specific countries that you identify as fraudulent

Venusaur said:

block traffic from specific countries that you identify as fraudulent

Click to expand...

Well no, I don't want to block entire countries, because there are legitimate users in every country. I just want to block the traffic type. For example, I know that I want to block "Proxy" traffic because that is fake.


But what about "Hosting" or "Tor" or "Relay"

SaveFiles said:

Hello,

We are able to detect if traffic is a VPN, Tor, Relay, Hosting, or Proxy.

I am trying to block/redirect the fraudulent traffic. Which one of those 5 factors should I block?

I obviously know that I don't want to block VPN, but what else?
(The goal is to improve our cpm with our ad networks, they don't want fake/bot traffic)

Click to expand...

If you are able to detect the type of traffic you are getting, you should also be able to detect which country those traffic are coming from.
Then block the countries where your unwanted traffic are coming from

lucyh0t said:

If you are able to detect the type of traffic you are getting, you should also be able to detect which country those traffic are coming from.
Then block the countries where your unwanted traffic are coming from

Click to expand...

Okay, I'm not going to block every single United States traffic. That is a dumb thing to do. Please read what i said above ^

SaveFiles said:

Okay, I'm not going to block every single United States traffic. That is a dumb thing to do. Please read what i said above ^

Click to expand...

Where is most of your business coming from, may I ask? Meaning, why waste my time and resources on places that are not making me money? I hope you get what I am saying or not.

Mrnewbie said:

Where is most of your business coming from, may I ask?

Click to expand...

A lot of USA, Brazil, Indonesia, Canada, India, Germany, etc. All over the place.

SaveFiles said:

Hello,

We are able to detect if traffic is a VPN, Tor, Relay, Hosting, or Proxy.

I am trying to block/redirect the fraudulent traffic. Which one of those 5 factors should I block?

I obviously know that I don't want to block VPN, but what else?
(The goal is to improve our cpm with our ad networks, they don't want fake/bot traffic)

Click to expand...

reduce fake/bot traffic, and focus on blocking or redirecting Tor, Relay, and Hosting traffic, as these are often used to mask fraudulent activities

Tor is the go-to for bots, so blocking that makes sense, VPNs, while they can be misused, also have legit traffic, so be careful with tha

shijin said:

Tor is the go-to for bots, so blocking that makes sense, VPNs, while they can be misused, also have legit traffic, so be careful with tha

Click to expand...

K thanks for the advice. I was on the fence with blocking Tor. But I figure I might as well

While VPNs are off the table, you might want to consider blocking Tor traffic, as it's often used for anonymity and can be a source of fraudulent activity.

block traffic from the specific areas

Okay, I'm manually going through my Cloudflare and I'm searching top IP's.

I found this one: 45.128.78.194




When I go to RapidSeedbox website, they sell rotating residential proxies, which is obviously people sending fake traffic to my website.

Correct?

Now, there is a different ip 104.28.214.161:


It has "Hosting" as TRUE. Does this mean it is a bad ip too, and I should block it?

bump

What is your definition of “fraudulent” traffic? Is fraudulent in reference to bots only, or is there something else?

Zombie Pop said:

What is your definition of “fraudulent” traffic? Is fraudulent in reference to bots only, or is there something else?

Click to expand...

Well, whatever traffic from people that are sending "fake" traffic. So proxies, automated traffic, etc.

People are sending fake traffic in order to gain fake views and money from us

Go to DeepSeek and ask

How do I block [name your traffic sources]

I have a website that does this, and customers want to game our system by sending fake proxy traffic and get free revenue.


Learn to talk to AI, not humans.

You see how poor this whole thread is.



Edit: and if you are unable to solve at first, keep talking to AI, ask for alternatives and you will learn faster than here.

SaveFiles said:

Well, whatever traffic from people that are sending "fake" traffic. So proxies, automated traffic, etc.

People are sending fake traffic in order to gain fake views and money from us

Click to expand...

You can set up a managed challenge on Cloudflare WAF for any url that includes / (so every url on the website). Managed challenges can be deployed for every visitor, for threat score, or as a rate limiter.

I use managed challenges on my websites to prevent most bot traffic, personally. BHW also uses managed challenges for traffic and rate limiting via CF WAF.

You will also want a solid whitelist if you’re going to use a web application firewall for blocking or challenging traffic that includes your server ip, google ASN, Bing ASN, and anything else that needs to be whitelisted. The whitelist needs to be positioned at the top of your WAF rules list. Position matters as to how traffic is analyzed and filtered.

My WAF rules list is in this order:

Whitelist
Block
Managed challenge

Consider hiring a professional if you can’t deploy a proper web application firewall. You can wind up blocking important traffic, or server operations like wp cron and even caching operations.

Blocking individual IPs is not a sustainable option.

Google, Meta, Microsoft and several other bigtechs have never been able to effectively detect fake traffic, this is a very advanced task.

From what I've seen, you have a file hosting site that pays people who uploaded and had access to the file, right? In this case, you show ads and profit (or want to profit) from the difference between the CPC you receive and the one you pay. For example, you pay an average of $0.05 per CPC to the file's author but received $0.10 CPC from the advertising company, so you profit $0.05 for each CPC, right?

Speaking of technology, why don't you put reCaptcha or Cloudflare Turnstile on the file download screen?

Look at the benefits:
- Uses the best technologies to analyze traffic
- There are bots for recaptcha but the value to solve it would be higher than the one received by the uploader
- Even if you go from the free recaptcha/turnstile it will still be cheaper than paying uploaders who use bots

And another thing, it is possible to create algorithms that detect high peaks of access to the same file from a user from different countries, coming from a direct link... and not count them in the uploader's earnings.

In addition, after detecting and identifying these accesses, create an ML model that automatically analyzes and only after it has been analyzed does the value enter the balance of the person who uploaded.

Zombie Pop said:

managed challenge on Cloudflare WAF

Click to expand...

The issue with this is that it doesn't work through iframe embeds:



It actually makes every embed not work. We could not include the embeds as part of the WAF, but then people could still send fake traffic through these embeds.