Market research companies funnel billions of dollars each year into consumer insights, but this valuable data is often skewed by fraudulent survey responses. These fraudsters are out to take advantage of the rewards offered for completing and registering for surveys, and they have become smarter in their tactics, even in the face of antifraud technology.
Which are the most common methods of detecting fraud?
Survey fraud is not only a waste of money, market research survey fraud detection can lead to research that misses the mark and hurts brands. It can also lead to product innovation that fails, advertising that doesn’t resonate and lost hard-won customer loyalty. Brands need to demand full disclosure and robust sample quality and fraud detection controls from their market research partners.
There are many ways to catch fraudsters in the act, and there are a few key strategies to keep in mind while designing your survey. For example, using a question at the start and end of the survey asking respondents to answer the same question in a different way can help detect duplicate or fraudulent responses. Also, including a question asking respondents to enter their birthday can prevent fraudsters from using preprogrammed responses that would match the date of birth.
It’s also helpful to track the IP address of each respondent and flag any suspicious or recurring ones. Using device fingerprinting (a process that gathers metadata about a respondent’s unique devices, settings and configurations) is another great way to discover fraudsters. For example, some solutions like FingerprintJS use advanced open-source JS to identify a response as authentic or fraudulent by matching a device’s features with those of known fraudsters.