A loyalty program administrator may mistakenly award a large number of points or inadvertently misconfigure the system, resulting in such an error. A loyalty member lucky to receive the windfall could exploit the program for excessive rewards. Alternatively, a loyalty member may fraudulently abuse a feature or a loophole in the program to gain excessive rewards. Either case can result in increased losses and liabilities for the business offering the loyalty program.

To detect, mitigate, or prevent such instances of abuse, the Zinrelo loyalty platform offers the following measures:

Activities

Certain point-earning activities have pre-defined rules, as described below, to limit usage.

1. Birthday/Anniversary Bonus: Do not award points more than once per year. This is a non-editable rule.
2. Share on Pinterest, Instagram, or Facebook: Do not award points more than once per week. This is an editable rule.

In addition to these pre-defined rules in the Zinrelo system, an admin can configure frequency and exclusion rules as well as set up moderation or manual approval of points awarded for any activity.

Reward Auto-Redemption

If auto-redemption is enabled, a reward can be auto-redeemed a maximum of 10 times per user. This is a pre-defined, non-editable limit. Additionally, rules can be set to limit the frequency of redemption, e.g., a reward
can be redeemed by a user at most once a day or week.

Refer-A-Friend

If a referred friend signs up using an existing email address, then the referring member is not eligible for the reward.

Receipt Scanning

The following checks are applicable in the case of receipt scanning to detect or prevent fraud. Based on these checks, the Zinrelo system can be configured to either flag such receipts for moderation or automatically reject them.

1. Auto-detection of duplicate receipts: For a given loyalty member, duplicate receipts are automatically detected based on parameters such as the receipt ID, time of purchase, order total, and number of products on a receipt.
2. Date of purchase: The date of purchase refers to receipts that are older than a configurable number of days from the time they are uploaded.
3. Missing Information: If a receipt is missing any critical label or field such as product name, SKU, store name, etc. For instance, the ‘product name’ field must be present in the receipt.
4. Product identifiers: If the extracted product information from a receipt does not contain specific keywords in the field values, such as UPC, SKU, or product name fields, for instance, the ‘product name’ value must contain ‘Wines’.

Audit Trail 

The Zinrelo system provides a detailed audit trail to track if an admin has changed the configuration of the loyalty program, manually awarded points to members, or redeemed points on their behalf.

Future Roadmap

In addition to the existing features described above, in the future, we plan to add support for admin-defined thresholds and other ways to automatically detect anomalies and prevent misuse in a loyalty program.