What it does
Referral Protection sits between your referral program and your store, running a set of fraud checks you control. When it's on, every referral is evaluated against the checks you've selected, and the outcome is logged for your review.
Protection checks
Turn on only the checks that make sense for your program — each one targets a different type of abuse:
Enhanced self-referral blocking by email — blocks advocates who refer themselves using the same or a related email address
Shared phone number detection — flags when an advocate and their "friend" share the same normalized phone number
Checkout address matching — compares advocate and friend checkout addresses for suspicious matches
Referral link cookies — uses first-party cookies to retain and validate referral attribution
Existing customer validation — prevents customers who existed before the referral from claiming a friend reward
Advocate order-network matching — compares order IP evidence against referral and advocate IP evidence
Advocate referral limits — enforces the referral limits you've configured per advocate
Referral network/household protection — detects multiple referrals coming from the same household IP address
You can also set optional limits: a maximum number of referrals per network each week, and monthly or lifetime caps per customer.
Turning it on
Go to Referral protection in your dashboard
Open the Settings tab
Flip the master Referral protection switch on
Select the individual checks you want active — any checks you toggle are saved even while the master switch is off, so you can set things up ahead of time
Save your changes
Referral Protection is fully opt-in. Nothing changes for your store or your program until you turn it on.
Reviewing decisions
The Activities tab logs every check that runs once protection is enabled — what was checked, the outcome, and why. You can filter by:
Protection type
Outcome
Referral email
Date
This gives you a clear audit trail so you can see exactly how your program is being protected, and fine-tune your checks over time.