Not all leads are good leads, and lead generation fraud can have the opposite effects on your business’s reputation and turn into a huge PR problem. But forgoing leads altogether isn’t the right solution.
Instead, you need to plan your lead generation and verification process to prevent fraud and ensure the highest quality and authenticity. Those are key points you need to take into consideration for your business model if you operate partially or fully online.
Lead generation fraud isn’t only unfavorable as a business practice, but ignoring it can bring your business more harm than good. After all, your cold outreach and marketing teams would have to market either to uninterested people who weren’t in your target demographic to begin with or wait on the line for a dead-end number that’ll never answer.
What is Lead Generation Fraud?
Lead generation fraud is when someone’s personal information ends up in your contact database through a form or a submitted inquiry without their owner’s explicit consent. While this might not seem like a big issue initially, this could have severe reputational and legal issues for your business if it occurs frequently enough.
In most countries worldwide, consumer protection laws and regulations prohibit storing any type of user information without their permission. Not to mention, reaching out to unsuspecting leads is never a good idea as they’d most likely feel confused or inconvenienced by your inappropriate call, text, or email.
Phone Number Validation
If you collect phone leads through online sign-up forms or questionnaires, you should consider implementing a type of phone number validation into your process. As the name suggests, phone number validation services ensure that the phone number a user submits is real and meets the rest of their information on the form, using advanced phone validation APIs. But what is a phone number validation API?
API validation is a piece of code that you integrate into your online forms. It then works on validating phone numbers as they are submitted. When the API detects a fake or disconnected phone number, it could either ignore the entire data entry or send out an error message, informing the user that the phone number they’ve entered is invalid. This approach saves you from vetting and dealing with dozens of fake and invalid phone numbers later on.
In the case of fraud, it may be the case that it is an active phone number submitted but that it does not belong to the person submitting the form. An advanced API for phone number validation can still catch this by examining the information on the rest of the document.
Filter IP Addresses to Discover Botting
One of the most significant sources of lead generation fraud is bots. They’re simple programs that can connect to the internet and perform specific tasks. In some cases, bots are responsible for spamming online forms by submitting false information, and other times intentionally negatively affecting an online business. However, bots are also easy to stop.
Adding a logic question or a simple CAPTCHA to your form is another way to prevent most bots from submitting fraudulent information. Additionally, you can import lists of bots and spam IP addresses from online archives and databases and block them to reduce the chances of false leads and lead fraud.
Check Analytics
Most bots online use a limited set of IP addresses. By tracking your website’s incoming traffic and monitoring it, you can use analytics to assess click-through rates and identify suspicious behavior. While some troublesome IP addresses might belong to malicious, human individuals, bots are likely at the root of most of them.
Regular Vetting
People’s contact information, whether it’s emails or phone numbers, continually changes. Just because a lead was authentic when the user first submitted it doesn’t mean it’s still real now.
Depending on what happens to the contact information, if you don’t regularly vet your database for real numbers and emails, you’d end up in one of two scenarios. The first is the contact detail was recycled to a different individual who didn’t consent to use their data or isn’t in your target demographic.
Second, are dead or useless contacts. It’s when the phone number or email address was abandoned and no longer reach the person who submitted them. While those cause fewer legal issues and reputation struggles, they can cost you with marketing time and email list fees.
Avoiding Lead Generation Fraud
Not only is lead generation fraud resource-intensive for your business, but it can also be illegal and have serious consequences. Implementing lead generation fraud prevention strategies early is your best option to sticking to clean business practices and maintain the trust of your clients and the general public.
Still, lead generation fraud prevention is continuous work. As technology becomes more available and advanced, new ways to spam and create more complex bots would also arise; your defense strategies need to keep up.
