Default Referral Status

I have set the default referral status to pending however whenever a new user signs up via an affiliate’s link the referral is marked as “approved” Everything else is working normally.

How do I set it so that all new referrals will start as pending and so that I can move them to approved manually when I have confirmed payment.

In other words, I want all new referrals to have a default status of “pending”

Please help.