Filtering/preventing fake leads

[Anonymous]

Sort of a general question, to see how people have handled this....

I did a wide-range search of our leads, so I could get a large set of names. In the process, I noticed several fakes, i.e. "Mr. ShAhahawh Sqewqhwqweq". Many seemed to be Russian in origin, listing a .ru domain in company name, things like that. In a spot check, it looks like some are from people who've requested a white paper via one of our online forms, etc.

Does anybody have suggestions for filtering things like this out? Best practices, etc.? I don't want to do any Country blocking or limiting of an IP block. We're slowly going International and there could very easily be a real lead in any of these places.

Right now, we have a few basic filters in place, such not allowing non-company email addresses like hotmail, gmail etcetera.

[Anonymous]

You may want to use a data cleansing tool like ringlead to clean up your database

[Josh_Hill13]

There are several threads on handling bad data like this, which is a bit different than using RingLead, etc. RingLead and the ilk will have scenarios to do this automatically. But you can definitely setup smart lists to capture the most obvious names or domains like

STARTS WITH [special character]

FIRST NAME CONTAINS [numbers]

etc.

There are also threads on stopping spam or empty leads at the form level.

[Anonymous]

Can you link to those threads (about stopping SPAM at the form level)?