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Fake contact information in our forms

by malenebm
3 replies
Hi all!

I work at a marketing agency, and lately (1-2 months) we have been receiving fake contact information in our forms. The information that is given is actual information and actual people living in norway (where we are based), but when we contact them they have no idea what we are talking about and are just random people. We have ruled out competitors, and tried reCAPTCHA as well as clickcease. The fake leads are still coming in.

Previously we were getting actual good leads, and we had a great ROI on our ads, but now we have even stopped most of our ads in google. Still, today, we received a fake lead on a service that we do not promote through ads (so the fake leads are not only through ads).

Other clients have also been telling us that they have been having these problems lately, so it seems to be a problem beyond just our website.

Has anyone else experienced this and has been able to find out how to stop it? And also, if this is scammers, WHAT is the purpose of this? I cannot for the life of me understand why they do this, because they don't earn anything by just giving us random peoples contact info..
#contact #fake #forms #information
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  • Profile picture of the author Mark Singletary
    What kind of contact form is it? Is it a WP plugin? Did it come with your theme? Did you develop it yourself?

    Mark
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  • Profile picture of the author talfighel
    Most leads these days are fake.

    Someone will want to see what's on the other side of the form and just add a fake email.

    The person who adds an email may be real but the lead may be fake.
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  • Profile picture of the author savidge4
    My suggestion would be to access your log file ( you can find it in the main directory of your site ) and then open it in Excel using ( "65001 : Unicode (UTF-8)" for "File Origin" and "Comma" for "Delimiters" )

    REALLY REALLY helps to know how to excel at this point, BUT you will know the time frame of each instance ( Form submission ) and the log file will be in chronological order newest on the bottom, oldest on the top. So you then can identify the IP Address of each of the bad submissions.

    Once you have the IP address' or singular Address, you can block these in ".htaccess". It will obviously help here if the "attack" is being operated from a single IP address. If there are plural IP address' one thing you want to look at is the collective IP address for any type of pattern. IP address' are very much like phone numbers, meaning if you KNOW what the numbers mean you will know The City, the Zip Code and the Area code that user is from.

    To make this real easy or you, you can use a tool like ( https://whatismyipaddress.com/ip-lookup ) to figure all of this out, So maybe you will have to block individual IP address' OR you might be able to block a specific ISP or country of Origin.

    Hope that Helps!
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    Success is an ACT not an idea
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