Scammers/Sellers keep submitting via our forms

[dhejl]

We have forms on our website that visitors can fill out if they want to get directly in touch with our sales team. When the form is submitted, the contact is reassigned across our sales team and they are then responsible for reaching out to the contact.

We're finding that quite a number of the submissions are "scammers" -- people who are trying to sell THEIR products/services to US, or simply trying to waste our time. 

We've already considered implementing CAPTCHA and double opt-in, but neither of these seem to do the trick. 

Help Needed: has anyone faced a similar challenge, or experimented with any workarounds that have helped to reduce these types of form submissions? Any advice is greatly appreciated!

[dhejl]

Hi @trevordjones, thank you so much for your input. Really insightful, I've gone ahead to mark it as a solution and we'll be trying out these suggestions.

[trevordjones · Accepted solution]

Hi @dhejl ,

Several of our clients run into this issue from time to time.  I have three pieces of advice to offer:

1.) Consider requiring a business email / blocking free emails for form submisisons if you are not already.  Spammers will often use "free emails" like gmail an yahoo for the submissions you are talking about.

2.)  Look at the IP country of the false submissions and consider blocking submissions from those countries. Russia, China, and several other foreign countries contribute a lot to this activity.

3.) Consider using a scoring property to identify the likelihood of a submission being spam.  You can provide points for free emails, questionable IP ranges, and invalid emails as well as job titles that don't fit your target criteria and other metrics.  You can use a workflow to filter notifications with high spam scores and even delete the contacts from your database.

Hope this helps!