Protect Against Spam Accounts

[katiebroyles]

TLDR: people are trying to sell stuff we don't need by submitting forms, and I want to see if we can deter it.

Recently, our organic growth has captured the eyes of many people trying to sell contact lists (and typically for us, those lists turn out to not be the best leads, plus its bad practice, so we prefer to ignore them), and these people have now started to use our form submissions to try and get our attention.

Usually, they'll list their name as the whole message they want to send, so I'm wondering if setting a character limit could be an option to deter them, or if there is a way to just block them from submitting anything if we know their email address.

What are some solutions you all have thought of to deter people that don't qualify as a lead from filling out forms?

[danmoyle · Accepted solution]

Hi @katiebroyles . You might always get a number of spammers filling out forms. What I might consider doing is adding the Persona property to your forms that asks someone to describe themselves, and include something like "I'm looking to partner with [Your Company]" as an option. This could help you create an active list of any vendors that you can suppress or delete from your CRM with regular maintenance. 

It also helps you put the Persona property to work for your marketing when you add it to forms. In the description portion of the property, start it with "I am" then describe each persona succinctly. 

Another option (assuming the Message property is where you see this) is to create an active list with the contact property Message and include specific hot words like "list" or other terms you know are red flags. Then you can suppress or delete these folks. 

The CAPTCHA option in forms may also help, but I've found that won't deter actual humans trying to sell you. 

Hope that helps! 

[HMerriman]

Could you possibly take advantage of this situation?  Perhaps place a submission form that's a direct CTA to them?  All those forms would flow to a different bucket that you could leave sit & rot OR periodically go look to see if there's anybody in there worth looking into?

[danmoyle]

@HMerriman interesting thought experiment. How would you have a second form for spammers? If I think of a form on a page (landing page, probably), where spammy submissions happen, how would you add another form that's a direct CTGA to thos folks? It's an interesting proposal for sure. 

[danmoyle · Accepted solution]

Hi @katiebroyles . You might always get a number of spammers filling out forms. What I might consider doing is adding the Persona property to your forms that asks someone to describe themselves, and include something like "I'm looking to partner with [Your Company]" as an option. This could help you create an active list of any vendors that you can suppress or delete from your CRM with regular maintenance. 

It also helps you put the Persona property to work for your marketing when you add it to forms. In the description portion of the property, start it with "I am" then describe each persona succinctly. 

Another option (assuming the Message property is where you see this) is to create an active list with the contact property Message and include specific hot words like "list" or other terms you know are red flags. Then you can suppress or delete these folks. 

The CAPTCHA option in forms may also help, but I've found that won't deter actual humans trying to sell you. 

Hope that helps! 

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @katiebroyles,

If you see that these contacts coming from the same email domains, you can block these domains in your form settings. Enabling CAPTCHA can also prevent some spam form submissions. Unfortunately, it's not possible at this stage to block IP addresses (there is a request for that in the HubSpot Ideas section however).

For those contacts who do get in the tool, I'd recommend setting up an active list – it sounds like you're already working on that. I'm managing a couple of portals that is getting a lot of spam from people trying to sell domains – always using the same types of messages, similar patterns. If you figure out what these submissions have in common (the same keywords in a field for example), you can create an active list and exclude this list from any other automation, qualification etc. This would also be a list that you review on a regular basis to delete these contacts.

Other than that, there aren't any options that I know of. Anything else would make it harder for the regular website visitors to fill out the form – which we don't want.

Hope this helps!