How Skylup Cut Fraud Reversals by 80% and Onboarded 100 New Publishers in a Quarter
Skylup is a mobile advertising agency that operates PixyLabs, its in-house offerwall platform. Through a network of hundreds of affiliate publishers, Skylup connects games, surveys, finance platforms, and other advertisers with high-quality, engaged users.
From day one, Skylup has been strict about traffic quality, routinely turning down publisher relationships and the revenue that comes with them to protect the integrity of its data. This discipline is both its competitive edge and its ongoing challenge.
The Challenge
For years, Skylup managed to hold chargeback rates around 10% by carefully vetting every publisher and relying on an external fraud-scrubbing suite for detection. It was a painstaking process, but it worked, until it didn’t.
Unexplained spikes began to appear in Skylup’s fraud data, with their existing provider offering no clear diagnosis. When one spike pushed chargebacks to 40%, Skylup’s founder Jonathan Hazziza knew a manual-review-and-hope approach couldn’t scale. He needed a solution that could:
- Automatically block fraudulent incentive payouts before they could cause damage
- Protect Skylup’s reputation with its existing advertiser and publisher partners
- Operate with low false positives so legitimate traffic, and growth, wasn’t sacrificed
Skylup had been a long-time customer of Swaarm, using it as the operational foundation for measuring, analyzing, and optimizing publisher traffic at scale. Swaarm’s comprehensive performance marketing suite spans MMP, attribution, analytics, optimization, and fraud prevention in a single platform.
The Strategy
Integration with Swaarm and Verisoul
📊 Skylup runs traffic through Swaarm
All publisher and advertiser activity is tracked, attributed, and analyzed inside Swaarm’s platform in real time.
🔌 One-click Verisoul activation
Swaarm’s native integration with Verisoul means fraud prevention can be enabled in under five minutes, no engineering work required.
⚙️Per-publisher tuning via self-service dashboard
Skylup uses Verisoul’s dashboard to configure fraud thresholds for each publisher-advertiser pairing, maximizing data quality while keeping false positive rates low.
🛡️Automated blocking at scale
Fraudulent accounts are caught and blocked automatically, no manual review queues, no analyst bottlenecks.
This combination of Swaarm and Varisoul gave Skylup something it never had before – a fully automated fraud layer that runs continuously, adapts per campaign, and requires no dedicated headcount to operate.
Why Swaarm, and Why Now
Following the 40% chargeback spike, Skylup evaluated its options based on three core criteria: reliability, cost-efficiency, and configurability.
The team needed a centralized system that could operate automatically without adding complexity or requiring manual intervention. Swaarm stood out as the solution that could transform fraud prevention from a reactive process into a proactive, automated workflow.
By integrating Verisoul directly into their existing setup, Skylup was able to incorporate high-quality fraud detection signals seamlessly. Through Swaarm’s self-service dashboard, the team could fine-tune fraud rules at the publisher level without relying on technical support.
This setup also enabled automated optimization based on real-time data, including geo-blocking, bot detection, and payment fraud prevention. The result was a powerful combination of automation and granular control,allowing Skylup to scale securely without compromising on data quality.
The Result
Measurable Impact Within the First Two Weeks
Skylup went live with the Swaarm + Verisoul integration and saw meaningful results almost immediately. In the first two weeks:
Reversal rates dropped ~80%
Fraud that was slipping through the previous provider was caught automatically. The combination of Verisoul’s detection and Swaarm’s integration eliminated the manual gap that allowed spikes to occur undetected.
34% of accounts blocked at the door
More than a third of incoming accounts were identified as fraudulent before they could trigger a payout or damage advertiser trust.
100 new publisher partners onboarded
With a reliable fraud layer in place, Skylup was finally confident enough to work with publisher sources it had historically avoided. Jonathan now vets traffic quality with Verisoul rather than with caution-driven refusals, unlocking meaningful new revenue streams.
Fraud prevention became a sales tool
Rather than being a background operational concern, Verisoul became a feature Skylup actively pitches to new advertising partners. The ability to demonstrate industry-leading fraud controls is now a competitive differentiator in a market where data quality is everything.
