How do we prevent phishing bots and spammers from filling out our forms?

[Anonymous]

We're starting to see a number of leads that are coming in from our contact us page that appear to be spam. What are some ways we could prevent this? Though the landing page currently uses an SFDC form, we are in the process of converting all website forms to Marketo forms. 

Our SFDC admin has suggested a hidden CAPTCHA method, but I'm not sure if the same is possible on a Marketo form. 

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

Jessie,

There are a few articles on this. Do a quick search for "empty leads" or "form bots"
Try this article too. I think it has a link to one of those
http://www.marketingrockstarguides.com/marketo-form-instructions-164/

https://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000L3EE

https://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000KyqZ

https://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000Kzd2

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

Unfortunately the three Marketo document links are no longer available

[Anonymous]

Thanks, this works for me.

[Anonymous]

Some of the links in Jesse's post aren't working.

[Anonymous]

Can you please provide good links for this information?

[Anonymous]

I am intrigued by Jessie's "Best Answer" but for each link I get the following respectively:

1. MKTO community page with this content "An Error occurred while processing your request. Please try again later." 


2. Question:

Can I add CAPTCHA to a Marketo form?

Answer:

No, you cannot, but you also should not need to. Marketo has a built in protection mechanism that helps tremendously with reducing the number of spam form fills. Adding a CAPTCHA would negatively impact your legitimate conversion rates.

3. Same as the first link.


If I weren't kinda desperate to solve this issue, I'd laugh  🙂

[Anonymous]

I am desperate to solve this issue, and I'm not laughing...

[SanfordWhiteman]

I posted a recipe for adding a ReCAPTCHA to Marketo forms a couple of months ago -- search for it.

The claim that you can't add CAPTCHA to Marketo forms hasn't been true since webhooks have been available.

[Anonymous]

Thank you. I wrote that out of frustration/humor, but I'm not completely helpless. Possible solutions include:

1) Creating a "honeypot" or hidden field that filters anyone who fills it out to a Smart List for deletion Stop 99% of Your Spam Leads with Marketo | Fab Capodicasa | LinkedIn

2) Adding CAPTCHA - MktoForms2 :: reCAPTCHA  (your link from another article)

3) Hiring a web developer - Add JavaScript validation to the header of your landing pages. This checks to see if JavaScript is enabled on the browser - and, if not, redirects the lead to a page that advises them to do so. Spam bots do not have Javascript enabled.

4) Adding a script that restricts certain parameters ex. Email Domain http://developers.marketo.com/blog/restrict-free-email-domains-on-form-fill-out/

While all of these are valid solutions I still find myself a bit lost here. My personal solution for the time being is to take the Smart Lists that I've already created (This article is helpful for setting those up - http://developers.marketo.com/blog/how-to-clean-your-marketo-database/ ) to identify the spam leads using several filters and simply add a Flow step to delete them as they're identified.