Despite all the technology and fraud protection tools, scammers are still finding ways to use bots to defraud lead generation companies. However, CATCHA which means “Completely Automatd Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” turns out to be a really, really annoying method that actually hurts conversions. According to a study at Stanford University CAPTCHA has only a 85% success rate and a lot of people get frustrated and give up.
Bots are a serious issue in the industry, and some sort of spam-trap needs to be used. Recently the industry even found a CPA network owner out of China posting on message boards for programmers to create bots to help defraud his advertisers – and he’s still moving from network to network scamming.
Here are some other ways to prevent bots:
- Honeypot Trap
Bots love anything that they can fill out. If you create a CSS code that invisible to users, but if its ever filled out it will cause validation to fail, you have a great system to catch these nasty bots. Here is a great example of how this can be done. - Detect Presence of JavaScript and then have a javascript box.
Basically, ensure that the person on the other end is using a browser, and require them to fill something out. We use this in the form of G.A.S.P. which is a simple check box in our comment section that requires people to check if they are not spammers. Works really well, and keeps almost all the spammers away. - Skill Testing, Math Questions
The most common ones are asking people to answer a mathematical question, adding numbers to together or answering commonly known facts. - Use Third Party Verification
Using Facebook, Twitter and other signups, as a requirement would be an easy way to make sure that a bot isn’t filling stuff out. Combine this with other methods, this is a great way to improve the entire process and speed up people’s entire experience since it often will pre-fill fields as part of the API.
