5 Steps to Prevent Online Survey Fraud

The community panel today has a big challenge that is online survey fraud. The market research industry has become continuously challenged by the rising level of online fraud, trading of information integrity, and data quality.  Technology and innovation have helped in the use of online surveys as a method of market research to support quality, however, there is a downside. Survey fraudsters like nefarious individuals, competitors, click farms, and bots are utilizing technology to participate in surveys and generating fake responses, and disrupting the survey provider’s mission. Most of the companies have been encountering this for quite a long time. They see the organized crime in the online market research– in the form of fraud – inflating traffic and clicks on campaigns as malicious players attempt to earn by participating with fake identities.

Community panels always have good incentive programs to attract traffic but it is subject to fraud whereby study respondents whether eligible or ineligible participate multiple times with falsified IP addresses and there are several ways to hide the identity from community panel software such as signing up a user panel multiple times, setting up multiple email ids. The intention is to qualify for multiple online surveys, as there is a reward or incentive for participating and completing the online survey. Obviously, who wouldn’t want to earn by just sitting on a couch?

 

How do you protect your custom online panel research?

Good fraud detection process requires a cautious understanding of the various strategies that may be adopted by these fraudsters. Many of these quality checks should be worked from the moment of registration. During registration, many users jump their IP addresses or participate with multiple accounts, this is the most common fraud which market researchers face.

To protect from this fraud, you have to increase multiple quality checks such as:

• Security updates
• Double Opt-in
• IP address validation
• Regular tricky questions
• Mailing address verification

Apart from that, Online Panel Management Software can be re-engineered to help prevent internet fraud. You can disable the back button that can prevent “fraudsters” from going back through the survey, revisiting and resubmitting their responses easily. However, legitimate users may change their mind about surveys, and may legitimately want to alter a previous response but would be unable to do so. To solve this issue, the survey could be constructed to allow respondents to review answers periodically.

 

How to prevent fraudsters from your online survey panel data

IP Geo-Location Information

IP GEO location information has been implemented by more than half of all companies with another 13% indicating plans to implement. Fixing the area of clients dependent on IP address should be possible for most gadgets, however different factors here can turn into an issue if IP is overridden by mysterious programs, VPN, or other privacy tools.

 

Identity Address Validation

By Identity address validation, you can validate via real-world identities such as a postal address, email id, and other personal identities against an existing database. By assigning a unique value of a user you can remove duplicate entries as well.

 

GEO Location Distance Check

By Geolocation distance check,  the distance of a user with a secondary device can be identified. With this feature, you can track the same user with a different device.

 

Mobile OTP verification

Mobile OTP verification also helps us to prevent fraud. Registration of each user with a unique Mobile number helps us to prevent fraud account registration.

 

Blocked registrations from blacklisted domains

To prevent deceptive domains, we can mark the domain in the database if a user is trying to participate via bot. Once it identified we can block registration from the blacklisted domains list.

 

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash