Bad Leads filling out forms

[Anonymous]

Has anyone had a problem with "bad leads" continutously filling out forms on your website/landing pages? I continue to see leads (which almost appear to be "robots") filling out a lot of our forms. They all have very strange names (i.e. "wrerourry wrerourryPT" or "ameboobioxelt ameboobioxeltFU"), with a 5 digit phone number (123456), and have filled out "google" as the company name. I don't know why this is happening or really how to stop it. Anyone having similiar issues?

[Jenn_DiMaria2]

Hi Kelly,

I recently comment on this post:
http://community.marketo.com/MarketoDiscussionDetail?id=90650000000PeaOAAS
about a way to create your own Captchas in Marketo.

It doesn't prevent spammers from completing the form, but you can suppress alerts or syncing to SFDC.

Not sure if this helps or not, but it may make it less annoying until you figure out how to stop it completely.  I feel your pain 🙂

[Anonymous]

Kelly, this does happen - especially to companies with B2C sites.  Marketo has a built-in mechanism to prevent some of this, but you can add on your own as well.  There are several excellent Discussions  and Ideas with responses from Marketo about this that should help you understand and implement some preventive processes - Ideas to stop Spam form submits?, SPAM form submissions: email address, Spam through Marketo Form on External Website, Spam through Marketo Form on External Website, Block Spammer?, Spam filter outside Marketo LP, Security for Landing page webforms, Spammers.

[Anonymous]

since marketo landing pages allow the use of javaScript, couldnt you implement Captcha?

[Jenn_DiMaria2]

You can, with some additional configuration.

For example, you'd have to strip out the code from the landing page and paste the code itself onto a new landing page, then slip in the additional Captcha code into the form.

In other words, no more drag-n-drop.

At least, that was the case when I was thinking about implementing it last year.  It may have changed!

[Anonymous]

I've had this issue... I've also had invalid leads complete unsubscribe forms.  This seems to be odd. 

[Anonymous]

Captchas operate client-side and a lot of these spam-bots will just circumvent it. Without some sort of server-side intervention (i.e.; Marketo's built-in protections) there will always be a way to get around client-side protections.

I used to have a lot of problems with these spam-bots, but since moving to all Marketo form on all of our web properties, it has pretty much dissapeared, thankfully.

What I put in place, and still have in place, is a SPAM Queue in SFDC. Certain IP ranges and certain keywords ("http://" in the Name, Company, or Title fields, for instance) will toss the Lead into the SPAM Queue. I just check it every now and then and mass delete the bad ones.

Always a game a whack-a-mole with these spammers, isn't it?

[Anonymous]

Tom,
Correct, but it seems like from the Landing page templates there is some access to server side technology (through PHP). so im curious about how far i can go with that.