Shared link flags
A download link can be forwarded. No app can stop that. What this one does is make forwarding spend the original buyer’s own allowance, and tell you when a link starts behaving like one that has been passed around.
What raises a flag
The app watches how many distinct addresses one buyer’s download is collected from. Past a threshold, it raises a flag on the Fraud page, titled “Links that look shared, so you can decide what to do about them.”
That is the whole heuristic, and it is deliberately dumb. A more clever one would be a more confident one, and confidence is exactly what this should not have.
Nothing is blocked
The page says so itself: nothing here is blocked automatically. A flag is a signal for you to judge, not a verdict, and it does not interrupt the buyer.
That is not timidity. A household sharing a connection, someone downloading at work and again at home, a phone moving between mobile networks, and a VPN all look like several addresses. So does a link posted on a forum. The two are not reliably distinguishable from where the app sits, and blocking a paying customer’s legitimate download is a worse outcome than letting a shared one through.
Reading a flag
Open one and you get the download it is about, the buyer’s order, and the history of attempts on that link, so you can see the shape of it rather than a number.
Things that usually turn out to be innocent: a handful of addresses over weeks, addresses that cluster in one region, a total that is well inside the limits you set.
Things worth a second look: many addresses in a short time, from places that have nothing to do with the order, on a file with a high price or a resale market.
What you can do
Your options, in increasing order of severity:
- Leave it. Mark it resolved and move on. Most flags deserve this.
- Tighten that one download’s limits on the Orders page, without changing your store policy. A tight rolling window slows a link being passed around while barely touching a real buyer.
- Revoke the link. Takes effect on the next click. If the buyer is legitimate and you got it wrong, grant them a new download on the same order.
Resolved flags stay on the page under their own tab, so you can see what you decided last time about the same buyer.
If flags are the wrong tool
If what you actually want is for links to be hard to pass around, the limits do more work than the flags do. A generous total with a tight per-window cap is the usual answer: it costs a real buyer nothing and makes a widely shared link useless within a day. See download limits.