Customer story · Music streaming · Consumer subscription
Lumen cut paid-channel install fraud by 78% in one quarter.
How Lumen cut paid acquisition fraud by 78% — and stopped paying for installs that never opened the app twice.
- Fraudulent installs in paid channels
- −78%
- Annualized spend recovered
- $1.2M
- Bad partners cut
- 12
The challenge
Lumen had grown installs 4× year-over-year, but day-1 retention in two regions was suspiciously low. Their existing MMP flagged the channels as 'healthy.' Three CFO conversations later, the growth team had to prove which installs were real.
The approach
01Velocity + device-farm heuristics
Link Trail scored every install on click flooding (>20 clicks per IP / hour), device-farm density (>5 installs per IP / hour), and SDK-spoofing flags — and routed flagged installs out of billable counts automatically.
02Per-partner postback gating
Lumen gated postbacks to ad networks behind a fraud-score threshold. Networks only received credit for installs that cleared a 0.5 cut-off, ending the conversation about reconciliation disputes.
03Webhooks into the finance ledger
Every fraud flag was webhooked to Lumen's finance system, so chargebacks against bad partners were backed by per-install evidence.
The results
Lumen identified twelve partners running fraudulent inventory, cut them from the buy, and recovered an annualized $1.2M in spend. Day-1 retention in the affected regions returned to global baseline within six weeks.
Link Trail did not just save us money. It gave my CFO the evidence to fire bad partners with confidence — and that's the part that compounds.
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