The Digital Fortress: Tactiva’s Multi-Layered Playbook for Fraud-Proof Promotions

In the world of digital promotions, success creates its own risks. The more attractive your campaign, the more it becomes a target for bad actors using everything from edited receipts and fake accounts to automated bots. Left unchecked, fraud can erode your ROI, compromise your data, and damage the trust you’ve built with legitimate customers.

At Tactiva, we believe proactive, multi-layered defense is not an optional add-on; it’s fundamental to a campaign's integrity and success. We don’t just detect fraud; we design our entire platform to prevent it at every stage.

This is our playbook for building a digital fortress around your promotion.

The Core Philosophy: Layered Defense & Intelligent Risk Scoring

Our strategy is built on two core principles:

1. Defense in Depth: We apply specific controls at every stage of the user journey—from the initial upload to the final prize draw. A threat that evades one layer is caught by the next.
2. Intelligent Risk Scoring: Not every suspicious signal is outright fraud. Our platform analyzes a dozen signals in real-time to assign a risk score to each entry. This allows for nuanced, automated actions: Accept legitimate entries, Add Friction (like a CAPTCHA) for suspicious ones, flag entries for Manual Review, or instantly Block clear abuse.

The Gates of the Fortress: Our Key Controls

We view the entry process as a series of secure gates, each with its own intelligent guards.

Gate 1: Image & Upload Forensics (The Front Door)Before we even read a receipt, we analyze the image file itself.

• Duplicate Detection: Our system uses perceptual hashing (pHash) to instantly identify if a receipt image has been used before, even if it has been cropped, rotated, or slightly altered. This check runs across all users and all campaigns on our platform.
• Tampering Analysis: We automatically scan for tell-tale signs of digital editing, such as JPEG anomalies, inconsistent metadata (EXIF), and the "halos" that appear around photoshopped text.
• Format Validation: We reject screenshots, layered PDFs, and other non-standard formats commonly used to conceal fraudulent activity.

Gate 2: AI-Powered Validation (The Intelligent Core)Once an image is cleared, our AI scrutinizes its content with precision.

• Financial Reconciliation: Our AI doesn't just read the receipt; it validates it. It independently sums the line items, taxes, and discounts to ensure they match the printed total, flagging any discrepancies.
• Strict Rule Enforcement: Every campaign rule is checked server-side in milliseconds: minimum spend, required products, valid purchase dates, and whitelisted retailers.
• Uniform Reason Codes: Every rejection is tagged with a clear, uniform reason code (e.g., MIN_SPEND_FAIL, OUT_OF_PERIOD). This data is crucial for both user feedback and our monitoring dashboards.

Gate 3: Identity & Behavior Analysis (The Watchtower)We analyze entry patterns to distinguish genuine customers from automated bots and multi-accounters.

• Device Fingerprinting: We use privacy-preserving techniques to identify unique devices, allowing us to cap entries per device and detect coordinated abuse.
• Rate Limiting: Our platform automatically throttles and blocks rapid-fire submission attempts from a single IP address, device, or user account.
• Bot Detection: Suspicious patterns trigger invisible friction, like a CAPTCHA, to stop automated scripts without interrupting the flow for legitimate users.

Gate 4: Secure Rewards & Auditable Draws (The Vault)The final stage is just as secure as the first.

• Single-Use Rewards: All coupons and reward codes are strictly single-use and can be bound to a specific user ID or device to prevent unauthorized sharing and multi-redemption.
• RNG Transparency: Our prize draws use a cryptographically secure random number generator (RNG). The exact method, seed, and a timestamped log of the process are recorded, creating a fully auditable trail to guarantee fairness and handle any regulatory inquiries.
• High-Value Review: All high-value prize wins are automatically flagged for a final manual review to verify identity and eligibility, ensuring your most significant rewards go to deserving customers.

The Command Center: Live Monitoring & Anomaly Detection

Our work doesn't stop once the controls are in place. The Tactiva team uses live dashboards to monitor campaign health in real-time, with automated alerts for anomalies like:

• A sudden spike in entries from a single retailer or region.
• An unusual burst of near-duplicate receipt submissions.
• A high failure rate for a specific reason code, which could indicate a new fraud tactic.

Conclusion: Run Your Campaigns with Confidence

Fraud prevention isn’t a feature; it is a core principle embedded in the architecture of the Tactiva platform. By layering advanced technical controls with intelligent risk scoring and proactive monitoring, we protect your budget, ensure fairness for your customers, and maintain the integrity of your brand.

Partner with Tactiva and run your next promotion with the confidence that every entry is validated and every euro is protected.

TL;DR

We combat promotion fraud with a multi-layered defense, applying security checks at every stage: upload, validation, identity, and rewards. This involves advanced image forensics to detect duplicates and edits, AI-powered validation of receipt data, and behavioral analysis to block bots. An intelligent risk score is assigned to every entry, triggering automated actions from adding friction to blocking abuse, resulting in a secure, auditable campaign that protects your budget and brand reputation.

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