Spammy Form Fills WITH recaptcha - WHY? And how to avoid?

HubSpot Ideas
1

Hello HubSpot world -

We are having a very strange and unique experience in the last 4-6 weeks since transitioning our primary lead generation “request a demo” form from Formidable (in WordPress) to HubSpot.

We have the reCaptcha on, we are blocking free emails, and have multiple required fields - all best practices to reduce the chance of bots filling in our forms. HOWEVER…

Since launching this new form, we get about 3-5 “spam” submissions a week. Sometimes more. It’s not a massive volume, but we’re a small business and get about 50 forms a month, so this is a considerable percentage. The submissions are fairly predictable

- Company “abc” or “asdf” or “sfwd” or some other random 2-4 letter key smash

- Phone number area code doesn’t match the IP location

- We have a numeric field on a B-test form without a phone number field, and this is *always populated with a phone number (on the regular version of the form, with a phone number field, the numeric field is 1212 or 1234)

We know these leads are spam, they are not just unqualified. The phone numbers are not connected and the companies don’t make sense if HubSpot tries to associate one.

Has anyone experienced this before? Found a way to avoid this? Any insight would be really appreciated, my alternative is to go back to Formidable and then I lose some flexibility with metrics and testing.

Thanks,

Gail

2

We are experiencing similar issues over the last 3-4 weeks. We have been using HubSpot forms since last fall, but all of a sudden out of nowhere we’re getting TONS of SPAM form submissions every day. All of our forms have recaptcha on them too and they’re still getting through with bogus names and comments and email addresses that are .my.id domains. Dually, we can’t easily block their IPs because HubSpot no longer provides individual IP addresses so we are having to isolate conversions on our server to find their IP and block them…but given they’re coming from all over the country it’s doing little to nothing to address the problem.

HubSpot needs to come up with more options and SPAM prevention for their forms. It’s also coincidental that Google had their Marketing Live a few weeks back and ever since then we’ve seen an inordinate amount of SPAM submissions from their performance max campaigns which they highlighted during that event.