US Survey Farm Fraud Discovered by CleanID
Blog | March 4, 2020
CleanID, OpinionRoute’s fraud prevention technology, has identified a new threat to survey data. We have discovered device farms built specifically for survey fraud traced back to Texas. This latest finding is a sign of how complex the effort to monitor and prevent fraud can be if you aren’t equipped with a strategy and the right tools.
This discovery is particularly unsettling due to the location from which it originated. The industry has identified similar fraud originating from places like China or Venezuela in previous years. Discovering this fraud coming from the US demonstrates how the issues around fraud are expanding. Simply put, yesterday’s fraud solutions aren’t catching today’s new threats.
Last year, this blog was posted and outlined an excellent background on how Persona.ly discovered Survey Fraud originating from “Click Farms” in China, a problem long known within the sample space. The piece does a great job demonstrating how many manual processes can be involved when a researcher attempts to identify this issue and ultimately prevent it from infecting the data set. This kind of effort on every project is untenable as a systemic measure, where CleanID comes in.
Because CleanID is a dynamic and evolving approach to fraud prevention, our multivariate model for detection caught this activity quickly. The technical nature of the fraud means this new threat currently circumvents a large majority of today’s existing market solutions, except CleanID.
Here are some key points to consider when thinking through Survey Fraud in 2020:
1. Yesterday’s most common solutions often catch less than 40% of the fraud common in today’s survey activity. (Finding from our internal Research on research).
2. Fraudulent activity has a disproportionately higher impact on your completes than your terminate statuses. (Fraud is showing up in your data and perhaps your client insights).
3. One instance of a survey farm effort could yield dozens of fraudulent completes, all presenting as unique devices/people in the most common approaches today. (Manual reviews couldn’t catch this without an obvious tell in the data.)
OpinionRoute is committed to delivering solutions for better data, while saving Researchers time. Our latest fraud catch is one more proof point.