What is traffic laundering?
Traffic laundering is disguising low-quality or fraudulent traffic so it appears to come from a legitimate source. Visits from bots, pop-unders or prohibited sites are routed through redirects or clean-looking pages, and their origin is hidden or faked, before they reach the page that earns money. The aim is to get paid for traffic that would otherwise be rejected.
Traffic laundering uses a chain of redirects, referrer spoofing and sometimes domain spoofing so the feed sees a respectable referrer. A milder cousin is traffic blending, where a little bad traffic is mixed into a lot of good to keep averages looking normal.
Honest buyers meet it as victims, when a seller resells cheap traffic as premium. Red flags: a source whose volume can be scaled instantly and without limit, visits with no referrer or with identical referrers, bursts at odd hours, high click rates with almost no time on page, and device mixes that do not match the claimed audience. Defences are buying direct from known platforms, separating each source on its own channel and scoring traffic independently.