Platform

Bot and fraud detection

Every visitor is scored the moment they land, using fused signals from the network, the browser, and the email. Sophisticated bots are blocked before your first tracked event, so you only ever see real human activity.

What it is

DataCops gives every visit a single fraud verdict, formed the moment the visitor lands. It fuses IP intelligence, more than 50 browser and device fingerprint points, behavioural timing, headless-browser detection, and email reputation. Up to 98% of automated traffic is filtered, before a visit is counted or sent to an ad platform.

About one in five visits to the average site is not a real person. If those get counted as customers and sent to Meta or Google, the algorithm learns that bots are your buyers. Removing them first is the whole point.

The detection stack

Three signal sources run together on every visit. No single one decides on its own; they are fused into one verdict. Two of them run on DataCops' own infrastructure, so your visitor data is never handed to a separate lookup vendor.

IP intelligence DataCops runs its own IP reputation service, tracking billions of addresses. Every visiting network is classified as residential, datacenter, VPN, proxy, or Tor, and scored for trust, in real time.

Browser fingerprint More than 50 browser and device points are read on the page, plus behavioural timing and headless-browser tells. Automation gives itself away even when it tries to look human.

Email intelligence Every email is scored before the signup completes: disposable and temp-mail, catch-all and role-based addresses, domain age and mail records, breach and fraud history, against a database of known fraud fingerprints.

Go deeperIP intelligence → Go deeperEmail fraud detection →

Six kinds of bots

Bot traffic is not one problem. It is six, and each has its own tell.

Crawlers and scrapers Told apart from real search engines by known ranges and verified bot networks, so genuine crawlers pass and scrapers are flagged.

Headless automation Puppeteer, Selenium, Playwright, and the like. Caught by the automation flag, missing or faked fingerprints, and behaviour no person produces.

Human-like bots Stealth automation on home-looking networks. Caught by the mismatch: a residential address paired with a fingerprint only a datacenter tool would have.

Datacenter traffic The visit comes from a cloud or hosting network instead of a home or phone. A strong sign it is not a real shopper.

VPN, proxy and Tor Matched in real time against known VPN networks, public proxy lists, and Tor exit nodes, so masked traffic is separated from real visitors.

Paid click farms Real people paid to click. Caught through the same network signals plus behaviour that does not match a genuine shopper.

Caught even when they hide

Bots rotate their network address and their browser name to look like many different people. It does not help them. When you fuse the deeper fingerprint signals, the same bot resolves to the same fingerprint cluster even as its address and user agent change. So it is caught before the first tracked event, not after it has already polluted your data.

The two layers back each other up. The network layer runs on the server, so it also catches bots that never load your page's script. The page layer watches behaviour and reads the browser directly, so it catches automation that hides its network. When the two disagree, DataCops weighs each signal by how strongly that kind of traffic tends to be automated, lands on one verdict, and records why.

Click fraud vs conversion fraud

Click fraud burns your budget: bots and click farms click your ads so you pay for traffic that was never going to buy. Conversion fraud is worse for your data: fake form fills and fake signups look like wins, so the ad platform learns to find more of them.

DataCops handles both. It filters invalid traffic, including the invalid-traffic categories Google recognises, and it verifies conversions before they are counted or sent, so neither your spend nor your optimisation is trained on junk.

Works with what you have

Alongside Cloudflare or Akamai. DataCops sits behind edge protection as a second layer, catching the automation that behaves human enough to get through.
Not a CAPTCHA. It asks your real visitors to prove nothing. Modern bots pass CAPTCHAs almost every time, and people hate them. DataCops watches quietly and decides.
Rules you control. You can block traffic from specific countries, networks, or address ranges on top of the automatic verdict.
Try it in observe-only mode. Run detection first without blocking anything, see what it would have caught, then turn on enforcement when you are ready.

What happens to a bot

Once a visit is ruled a bot, three things follow:

It is never counted as a customer, so your reports stay honest.
It is never sent to an ad platform, so your ads keep learning from real buyers.
It is never given a memory cookie, so the returning-visitor data stays clean too.

NextThe consent gate → Why it mattersConversions are training signals →