Liminal Insights Report

Link Index for Promotion and Loyalty Abuse in eCommerce 2025

Discover the 14 leading vendors redefining promotion and loyalty abuse prevention with unified intelligence and automated enforcement.

12/22/25

Report Overview

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.

Key Takeways:

Manual review drives cost and delay: 79% of organizations report high labor costs, and 96% of loyalty or referral abuse cases still require manual review.
Weak controls at enrollment and redemption:67% of practitioners cite ease of account creation, and 63% point to minimal checks at redemption as primary drivers of abuse.
Fragmented systems limit efficiency:Loyalty management platforms (67%), CRM systems (63%), and CDPs (46%) create silos that slow detection and weaken prevention.
Fraud share is climbing: Promo and loyalty abuse is projected to rise from 31% of total fraud to 42% in the next two years, a 35% increase.
New defenses are gaining ground: AI adoption is expanding, with 58% of organizations already using it and 25% evaluating. Automated enforcement of promo restrictions is expected to accelerate.

Methodology
The Link Index offers a detailed analysis and ranking of leading vendors for specific use cases, leveraging robust data and insights from Liminal’s market and competitive intelligence platform, Link. Liminal’s research team invites solution providers to participate in a company survey and analyst briefing. It uses a proprietary framework to assess and rank product capabilities based on their relevance to market needs. Liminal’s Digital Identity Landscape taxonomy and ontology are central to the Link Index, which precisely evaluates vendor solutions by buyer demand, product capability, and market presence. Liminal conducts a rigorous survey among buyers in the vendor selection process to identify the most in-demand product capabilities and the most valued product components. Market presence criteria included buyer satisfaction, market penetration, and brand recognition. The Link Index was designed to be used to inform go-to-market strategy and execution and provide guidance for solution buyers, specifically:
- Executives in corporate strategy
- Leaders of go-to-market execution
- Practitioners of solution implementation