Laravel Social Referral tracking

You may have heard of Untorch.com - A fully automated referral program for email signups.

They use social sharing and emails to allow users to 'share' to get the word out about their product/service. The problem boils down to tracking.

I have chosen laravel for its simplicity and socialite (the OAuth package for social networks) to allow me to get users emails etc. When a user is authenticated they are given a URL in a view with their hashed email as a URL to share. For Example http://ift.tt/203Qsls

I can check if a user is authenticated or not on that URL above as the original sharer, its the tracking of who they refer is a problem. I don't know what the Database will look like to track referrals.

Would it be possible to grab a user's share code like '9H&GxdF' above and when the referral hits the home page it has a url of http://ift.tt/1TzmOnh or http://ift.tt/203QvgQ. Then if it's a new user link them to a referee's share code and store in the database?

1.Is this the correct way to do it? 2.Is there anyway to detect fraudulent email addresses and fake accounts? 3.Any idea's on how i could implement those types of fraud/fake detection?

via Chebli Mohamed