Spam Form Submissions

[AGarcia905]

Hi. We keep getting fake form submissions. They're using a fake gmail email address or another similar email address (ex. hotmail, yahoo). We even had one person submit a form and then a few minutes later, submit another using a different fake gmail address. How can we prevent this from happening? We alrady have CAPTCHA enabled. 

[danmoyle]

@AGarcia905 @SWandell7 I found this article that lists some other ideas, including this interesting one: "Employ a honeypot. Honeypots are traps designed to lure in and then eliminate bots, viruses, or other bad actors that you may encounter online. When it comes to form spam, a honeypot is a secret, hidden field that bots will automatically fill out when they try to submit a form. Because that form field is hidden from human visitors, your users won’t even know its there. But when the bot fills it out, that form submission will go straight to the trash. Clever, no?"

That seems prety simple to do in HubSpot, and build a list to clean up weekly, or even daily. Or with a workflow perhaps. 

Hope that helps! 

[SWandell7]

Hi @danmoyle love the suggestion of a honeypot - how do you recommend setup in HS? 

[danmoyle]

@SWandell7 reading the tip, I'd simply create an open text field that maybe asks something like "What's your favorite color?" and keep it hidden. Then any contacts who fill this out just get enrolled into a workflow to delete them. Or at the very least, assign a task to research them and decide if they really are spam. Hope that helps! 

[AGarcia905]

Hi. As stated above, we enabled CAPTCHA a couple of months ago and it isn't working to prevent spam. Fake users are just inputting random characters in front of legitimate free email accounts (gmail, hotmail, etc) and HubSpot is considering them as valid regardless if they're actually valid. It's just looking at the formatting. We can't block all free email addresses as we do get some valid submissions from time to time. It seems nothing can really be done to prevent this from happening on HubSpot's side. 

[SWandell7]

We're having the same issue too and we have captcha and the blocking of email domains as well. Have you found any solution? 

[danmoyle · Accepted solution]

Hi @AGarcia905. According to this resource, (Prevent spam form submissions😞 

When a visitor enters their email address into the default email field on a HubSpot form, it is automatically validated by HubSpot. If the email address is not formatted correctly, or if the email has globally bounced, the form cannot be submitted.

You can provide additional protection against spam form submissions by enabling CAPTCHA on your form or blocking specific email domains and free email providers.

You can also block specific email domains and free email providers. Other than that, forms allow folks to put in whatever they want, so it's not something any of us can completely control.