Fake sign up is a serious problem for digital businesses. It can affect deliverability rates, skew audience data and cost businesses a lot of money.
It happens when bad actors use bots to fill out forms on your website with fake information, and it is a growing problem for many e-commerce platforms and other online services. They may do this for a number of reasons, from obtaining freebies and stealing user data to damaging your reputation and hurting business operations.
Seeds of Success: Strategies for Secure and Efficient New Account Origination
Most digital businesses request only a few pieces of personal information when new users register, such as a name and email address, which makes it easy for bad actors to create fake account registrations. This leniency is often exploited by spambots that are programmed to look for specific code and then fill out the form with fake information.
A sign that your audience data is skewed by fake sign up is when the first and last names provided don’t match the email address. Another sign is when there are many sign ups from a single geographic location all of a sudden, as this could be a spambot attack.
To protect your business against fake sign up, there are a few techniques you can use, such as rate limiting. This method prevents too many form submissions from a single IP address or device in a short period of time and is effective at blocking spambots. You can also implement a honey pot field, which is a hidden field that will only show up when the spambot fills out the form, letting you know it’s an attempted scam.