Running an ambassador program means putting real money and real discounts in the hands of people outside your company. Buzzbassador includes several safeguards to help protect your program, and it's worth understanding how each one works so you know what's covered automatically and what still needs your attention.
Self-referral: members ordering from themselves
One of the most common forms of program abuse is a member using their own referral code or link to buy from themselves, earning a commission on their own purchase (effectively just discounting their own order and getting cash back).
Buzzbassador can automatically catch this: if the "auto-decline rewards for self-placed orders" setting is enabled in your Preferences, any order placed by a member using their own attribution is auto-declined at the time the reward would otherwise be created. It shows up in your Rewards page under Declined rather than being paid out.
This setting is not forced on by default, so it's worth checking that it's enabled if self-referral is a concern for your program. If you ever want to honor a specific self-placed order anyway (for example, letting a member use their own generous perk intentionally), you can reauthorize that individual reward without turning the setting off for everyone else.
Coupon and discount code leaks
Permanent, reusable referral codes are convenient, but they're also exactly the kind of thing that ends up scraped and republished on coupon aggregator sites like Honey, RetailMeNot, or slickdeals, once a member posts their code publicly enough. When that happens, customers who never saw the member's content can still claim the discount, sales get misattributed, and margin erodes.
BuzzLinks are Buzzbassador's answer to this: instead of a permanent code, each click on a member's BuzzLink generates a single-use code on the spot, which expires the moment it's redeemed. Because there is no standing code to copy or scrape, there is nothing for an aggregator site to index.
That said, BuzzLinks don't make leak-checking unnecessary. Leaked codes don't only end up on coupon aggregator sites anymore: in one documented case, a merchant's leaked discount code was found to have been scraped directly into Google's AI Overview results, surfacing the code to searchers even without a traditional coupon site being involved. Because search engines and AI summary tools can pick up and resurface codes from wherever they were originally posted (an old blog post, a cached page, a screenshot someone shared), it's worth periodically searching for your own brand name plus "discount code" or "promo code" to see what shows up, even on programs where BuzzLinks are enabled.
Payout-side fraud holds (Tremendous)
Buzzbassador's own settings (self-referral auto-decline, shipping-country restrictions, the Reward Processing Period) govern whether and when a reward gets created and approved for payout. But once a reward is actually being paid out through the Tremendous integration, Tremendous runs its own, entirely separate fraud-screening system on top of that.
Tremendous, like any platform moving money at scale, automatically screens payouts against its own fraud rules to comply with banking and anti-fraud regulations. If a payout trips one of those rules, whether due to amount, recipient, account activity, or other factors Tremendous doesn't fully disclose, Tremendous will hold it for manual review on their end. This happens entirely within Tremendous's system: Buzzbassador cannot see the specific reason for a hold or release one on your behalf. Only your own Tremendous account (via your Orders/Activity dashboard, or by contacting Tremendous support directly) can investigate or release a held payout.
Notes:
These protections work together, not in place of each other: self-referral auto-decline and BuzzLinks reduce abuse and leakage on the front end, while Tremendous's fraud screening is an independent backstop on the payout side.
None of these settings substitute for occasionally reviewing your own Rewards and Members data for patterns that look off (a member with an unusual volume of self-shipped orders, for example).
If you're an ambassador reading this: these systems are designed to protect the brand's program, not to flag individual members unfairly. If a reward of yours was declined or a payout seems delayed, contact the brand directly, since they're the ones with visibility into their own settings and their own Tremendous account.