Online fraud is a challenge that every organization has been facing since the emergence of e-commerce in the 1990s and the threats are increasing rapidly with each passing year. According to Experian, 55% of companies have increased their budget in fraud prevention. This increasing fraud has also raised challenges in the market research industry. On average, nearly 15 to 30% of research data is fraudulent. To protect your customer panel research from these fraudulent activities, it’s important to understand how research fraud is evolving and increasing and the way to prevent your survey from custom panel research fraud.

 

Who are these fraudsters?

 

Fraudsters are the unqualified people who enter into research surveys to make sums of money. Some of the major threats to data quality are bots and cheaters. Sometimes bots complete the surveys or an unqualified person will enter into the survey on behalf of someone else multiple times. Without appropriate security features it gets difficult to identify these fraudsters and it requires thorough vigilance and checks and balances.

 

How to spot these fake panelists?

 

Identifying the honest panelist while conducting online surveys is basically a difficult task since we only have virtual contact with them. To increase the effectiveness of the survey response, one must exclude the duplicate respondent and the false identity from entering the research survey. Excluding those respondents who answer faster than the estimated time, excluding the respondents that answer the questions without paying attention, these are some of the measures that are adopted.

 

Also, there are some tricky methods to identify the fake panelists, such as:

 

Ask Obvious Facts-There are questions that need to be answered with an objective fact and not with an opinion. For example, What month are we in right now?

 

Enter ‘Captcha’ to move forward- To move ahead of the questionnaire, the respondent must enter the specific captcha code.

 

Specific question type control- The respondent must answer a specific question to be able to answer the next question.

 

IMC (Instrumental Manipulation Checks)- A question is displayed to the respondents that instruct them to do something else, something “different”. For example, to select a small dot that is presented on the bottom of the image rather than choosing a rating scale i.e., from 1 to 5.

 

What’s the motive of fake panelists?

 

The main motive of fraud respondents is to qualify for the research survey so as to make multiple incentives that are actually paid through online claim codes or through online rewards rather than mailing the actual earned amount through a cheque to the respondent’s physical address.

 

How do you prevent fraud in your custom online panel research?

 

While making a key decision about your business, it’s important to make sure about the quality of the data that the research suppliers are using while conducting surveys. In this advanced and dynamic world, one must not rely only on IP address checks and unique captchas to detect fake panelists. Security protocols with strong and robust techniques should be implemented across the process to produce effective quality data. While choosing the supplier, ask them about their latest implemented security protocols. Ensure whether they use IP address validation, mail address verification, straight-lining checks, and survey timing. Also, ask them for the use of multiple checkpoints while conducting research projects.

 

 

Let’s secure your survey

 

Over the past decade, choosing online surveys to collect data from respondents has skyrocketed. With robust and advanced technology, online surveys are a great way to get the desired and effective response from the audience. Online surveys make data collection easier and better. But at the same time, it is important to ensure that the data collected are safe, secured, and free from fraudsters.

 

Teamarcs has built its powerful platform in a way that keeps your data safe and your reputation intact. Our software comes with strong and latest security protocols and is an ideal digital solution that can offer total control over your research project with a powerful workflow that facilitates smooth collaboration among project stakeholders.

 

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