Acceptable Use Policy
This policy sets the ground rules for using Argus Grape. It applies to every workspace, team member, and affiliate operating under your account, and it backs the fraud and integrity controls built into the platform.
Effective June 12, 2026 · v2026.06.0
Purpose
Argus Grape is a server-side affiliate-tracking and viral-contest platform. Its value depends on the traffic it measures being real and the conversions it pays out being earned. This Acceptable Use Policy describes what you may not do with the service, so that attribution stays trustworthy for every customer on the platform. It supplements, and is incorporated into, our Terms of Service; violating it is a breach of those Terms.
You are responsible for the conduct of your affiliates and team members. Acts that would violate this policy if you performed them are equally prohibited when carried out by anyone promoting your campaigns or acting on your behalf.
Prohibited uses
You may not, and may not permit anyone else to, do any of the following on or through the platform:
| Prohibited activity | What it means |
|---|---|
| Click fraud and fabricated traffic | Generating clicks, conversions, or contest entries with bots, automated scripts, click farms, headless browsers, or any other non-genuine traffic. Each click is tagged with a 128-bit argus_cid, a salted device_fingerprint, and a salted ip_hash precisely so this can be detected. |
| Misleading or undisclosed promotion | Promoting affiliate links through incentivized clicks without clear disclosure, or through deceptive, false, or misleading claims about a campaign, product, or reward. |
| Spam and unsolicited messaging | Distributing tracking links via spam, unsolicited bulk email or messaging, comment spam, or any channel where the recipient has not consented to receive them. |
| Plan-limit and anti-abuse evasion | Creating multiple accounts or workspaces to evade plan limits, free-tier quotas, or an enforcement action. Signup screening detects duplicate-business registrations, device reuse, and disposable email domains, and records a risk score against the normalized email, email domain, website domain, hashed IP, and device fingerprint. |
| Reverse-engineering the platform | Probing, scraping, decompiling, or reverse-engineering the edge tracker, the /r/:affiliate_id redirect, the webhook endpoints, or any other part of the service, or circumventing rate limits and abuse controls. |
| Illegal, infringing, or deceptive destinations | Pointing tracking links at content that is illegal, infringes intellectual-property rights, contains malware, or deceives end users (including phishing, cloaking, or bait-and-switch destinations). |
| De-anonymizing hashed identifiers | Attempting to reverse, correlate, or otherwise de-anonymize a device_fingerprint, ip_hash, or any other salted identifier back to a person or plaintext value. |
| Unauthorized resale | Reselling, sublicensing, white-labeling, or otherwise making the service available to third parties without our prior written authorization. |
This list is illustrative, not exhaustive. Conduct that undermines attribution integrity, harms other customers, or abuses the infrastructure is prohibited even if it is not named above.
Enforcement
We enforce this policy automatically and manually, and we do not always announce when we act. Traffic that trips our per-IP rate limits or fraud heuristics may be silently flagged shadow_banned — the click is still redirected so the actor sees nothing unusual, but it is marked at the click layer. Conversions reconciled from a shadow-banned click are auto-rejected and never generate a commission.
Depending on the severity and persistence of a violation, we may also reject or claw back conversions, withhold or reverse affiliate payouts, throttle or disable a campaign, and suspend or terminate the offending account or workspace. Suspension and termination are governed by our Terms of Service. We may take any of these steps without prior notice where we reasonably believe doing so is necessary to protect the platform or other customers.
Reporting abuse
If you discover abuse of the platform — fraudulent traffic, a deceptive campaign, a security weakness, or any other violation of this policy — please report it. For security issues and suspected vulnerabilities, contact security@argus-grape.com. For all other abuse reports and general questions, contact support@argus-grape.com. Include enough detail — affiliate IDs, campaign links, timestamps, or an argus_cid — for us to investigate quickly.