topic How to stop fake lead generation in Lead Capture Tools

How to stop fake lead generation

PatientJourney — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 16:09:27 GMT

Hello community:

We have a free subscription for now.

In our webpage we have a lead generation form. For about 18 months we have been getting good leads, but for the past 3 months we've experienced 100% fake lead generation. A BOT or someone seems to be filling out our lead form with emails and cell numbers, but when we reach out, the person receiving our outreach says they never filled out our form. We could understand if a few of the leads were no good, but we're talking 100% of them. And this is something that did not happen for a year and a half.

Is anyone else experiencing this terrible issue? How can we solve it? Yes, we have contacted google adwords since that's all the advertising we do. But wanted to see if within Hubspot someone has experienced this issue and could advise us on how to solve this issue.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Re: How to stop fake lead generation

karstenkoehler — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 16:34:27 GMT

Hi @PatientJourney,

This is a tricky one. You could enable Captcha but that makes the conversion experience worse for everyone, not just the bots: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/forms/prevent-spam-form-submissions

Because of that, personally I'm not a fan of this solution. It creates friction for your potential customers.

Alternatively, if you assume that bots are behind this, you could add a hidden field in your form that is named innocuously. It could be any single-line text field, e.g. Previous job title. You would make this field hidden in your form.

The assumption is that a bot would also fill this hidden field, an actual contact wouldn't because for them it's not displaying. I've seen this work in the past and I've seen it not work. If it does, it would allow you to simply filter and delete those contacts where this hidden property is filled.

Best regards

Re: How to stop fake lead generation

craverhub — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 22:12:30 GMT

Hello. We've been wrestling with something similar - over the last ~12 months we've started wrestling with junk leads, also through Google Search. We've implemented Captcha & ClickCease but many still get through. Where we've had the most success is adding negatives for the search terms in Google that are generating the junk leads, although this is a bit of a game of wackamole.

Re: How to stop fake lead generation

CarefreeTC — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 04:16:02 GMT

It just started happening to us about a month or two ago I mean we had so many leads and they were great leads. Now the leads have almost halved and way too many of them are bots.

Re: How to stop fake lead generation

AChubak — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 09:53:17 GMT

Our biggest source for the issue is Google Ad campaigns. There's too many bot farms that own sites with Google Ads and are trying to generate revenue.

The honeypot mentioned in this post is 1 solution but it has to be a field invisible to the human eye but visible via CSS. We saw bots were skipping the field because they saw that the field was marked as hidden in CSS / HTML.

Also use a honeypot field that a google chrome form filler isn't likely to fill out on it's own.

Additionally there are tools you can use to validate phones and emails. Highly recommend those.

Re: How to stop fake lead generation

Jordanreyn — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 22:24:28 GMT

There are several layers to preventing fake leads. You can use services like Cheq to filter traffic from paid ads. You can also use captcha which has been discussed. You can also use 3rd party phone and email validation services once the leads have been submitted to allow you to differentiate between real and fake contacts. We review all new leads daily and delete the fake leads with invalid data.

Re: How to stop fake lead generation

MYahya1 — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 12:17:25 GMT

Hi,

Thank you for your detailed response and the suggestions on preventing spam form submissions in HubSpot.

I’m interested in implementing the hidden field strategy you mentioned—adding an innocuous single-line text field (e.g., "Previous Job Title") and hiding it from the form view. Before fully deploying this solution, I’d like to ensure it effectively filters out bot submissions without affecting genuine leads.

Could you please advise on the following:

Once implemented, how can I monitor the effectiveness of this approach?
Are there specific metrics or indicators I should track to assess whether bot submissions are being filtered out correctly?

Re: How to stop fake lead generation

DMollway — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 19:15:09 GMT

Hi there! I saw that you tagged this response to a similar question a few days ago. So we're having the same issue and have also implemented a honey pot but it hasn't helped. What's even more odd is that these are technically real people, but they didn't fill out the form and have no idea who we are Or the contact is actually someone else when we call. After looking at the analytics in the contact properties, I can't find anything in common with the submissions. They come from all over the site, from multiple forms. The source seems to be contained with paid search, but we know they're not coming from paid search because our Google ads account is not reflecting these deal counts. Also, the first and last referring site are the website url or google, which is normal.. Or it seems that way.. This has been going on for months and we have not been able to solve it. It seems as though it's a bad actor but we can't identify where they're coming from in order to filter them out. Any suggestions on where else to look?

Re: How to stop fake lead generation

DMollway — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 19:22:12 GMT

I just implemented this approach.
1. Create a custom contact property

2. Go to the form you want to edit and click "edit"

3. Add the custom property to your form(s)

4. Click on the option for that field that says "hide..."

Then, to keep track of these, I created a list.

Filter is [custom contact property] is known. So whatever you named that property, create a list where that property is known. Technically, the only contacts with that property would be bots.

Then, add that list as an "unenrollment" option to any workflows you have triggered by a form submission.

I will say - i just implemented this last night an unfortunately it did not work. Which means that this is a very sophisticated bot or it's a real person (people) submitting fake leads.

Re: How to stop fake lead generation

Jordanreyn — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 19:29:39 GMT

How do you know these are real people? Have you verified via a 3rd party source? Trestle's Real Contact add-on could help (in HubSpot's App store).

A few mor solutions to look at. Anura is a good solution for AdFraud. Are you capturing IP addresses from these leads? Try checking these against an IP service like MaxMind. This could help you identify anything suspicious about the IPs such as proxy addresses.

Hope this helps!

Jordan

Re: How to stop fake lead generation

DMollway — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 19:52:20 GMT

Our sales team is reaching out to these people. Everything about these leads are otherwise normal. All the form submissions have the first name, last name, phone number and email. In addition to the other custom fields we have. But when we reach out to “Jane” they answer and say “no I’m Eric and I live in TX” (even though the form says they’re in our location with the zip code). And it’s not just one location or specific email or phone number area code.

Re: How to stop fake lead generation

Jordanreyn — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 19:57:20 GMT

OK, in this case, you should try an identity verification solution. This
will help you confirm "Jane" is actually associated with the phone number
provided. I'm not aware of any other tools in HubSpot that do this in a
single query than my company (Trestle <>). We would
recommend Real Contact API. Please reach out to us to let us know if we can
help get the add-on installed. This is a pretty straightforward fix.

Re: How to stop fake lead generation

DMollway — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 02:53:35 GMT

I confirmed with Hubspot help desk that these submissions are coming from mobile devices that are not available in the US. That confirms that these are in fact Spam. The next suggestion was to implement the reCaptcha scoring. These are advanced bots,