Online surveys are only as reliable as the respondents behind them—but nearly half of those answers could be fake. Industry studies now peg fraud rates as high as 45%, draining budgets and eroding confidence in market research.
The good news? Rigorous, full-service data cleaning and pre-survey safeguards can stop bad data before it skews your strategy.
In this blog we unpack the newest fraud tactics, the smartest defense tools, and the cleaning checkpoints that turn noisy datasets into decision-ready insights.
The rate of survey fraud and survey farms is a growing concern, with recent estimates highlighting its increasing prevalence.
In 2021, Greenbook reported that 15% to 30% of market research data was fraudulent. This trend continued with Kantar publishing a fraud rate of 38% in 2023. Most recently, the Insights Association’s 2025 findings indicated a staggering 45% fraud rate.
These figures underscore that while fraud is not new, it is becoming a more pervasive and significant problem. This not only undermines the quality and reliability of research data but also wastes valuable resources as researchers spend increasing amounts of time identifying and removing fraudulent responses.
Implementing protections during the screening phase is crucial for identifying and blocking fraudulent respondents before they can even access your survey. This could be through a landing page that uses APIs to capture device information or through a pre-screener survey to test the potential respondent.
This has the great advantage of saving time and resources, as fraudulent data will never enter the survey to begin with.
Below are some innovative solutions being utilized to protect surveys from fraud at the very first point of contact.
Digital fingerprinting collects various device-level data to generate a unique identifier for each participant. This sophisticated “fingerprint” allows large-scale solutions to track a participant’s activity, effectively detecting fraudulent behaviors such as taking multiple surveys daily or altering demographic information across different surveys. Participants exhibiting such patterns can then be flagged across an entire platform, preventing them from accessing further surveys that utilize this tool.
Device-level analysis can play a crucial role in detecting survey fraud by focusing on preventing fraudulent traffic before it even enters a survey. This can be implemented through a quick landing page that allows an API to send device-level data to a partner.
A few factors worth collecting are:
Some new fraud services are relying on a pre-screener survey, essentially a “survey before the survey.
To confirm a respondent’s legitimacy, this page combines basic identity screener questions with an open-ended question that the participant should readily be able to answer. For instance, a B2B study targeting doctors might ask, “What is the most common treatment for diabetes?” The behavioral data from such responses can then be assessed for bot or AI usage.
This landing page also provides an ideal opportunity to utilize other techniques, such as geolocation evaluation and digital fingerprinting, mentioned previously.
While pre-survey techniques are highly effective in preventing a significant amount of fraud, researchers should still implement in-survey protections beyond the familiar red herring questions to further guarantee data quality and integrity.
Current AI usage in survey fraud often involves human participants leveraging AI to answer open-ended questions. This allows them to complete surveys faster or provide convincingly human-like answers while misrepresenting themselves. With the right prompting, these auto-filling AIs can mimic typical human respondents, making behavioral tracking, such as typing analysis, an excellent tool to counter AI-assisted fraud.
This technology focuses on tracking mouse movements and typing speed to discern if a respondent is genuinely human. It specifically looks for:
Bots, fraudsters, and inattentive survey takers share a common characteristic: they often treat survey questions in isolation. This makes coherence checking an incredibly effective method for assessing whether a response should be flagged for removal.
This can be done through more advanced methods like having tools assess the internal consistency across the entire survey. Or through survey design traps like having the same question repeated multiple times but with different polarity (e.g., “dislike” vs. “like,” “positive” vs. “negative,” “satisfied” vs. “dissatisfied”). Large deviations between these questions can be interpreted as a bad response.
Even with robust pre-survey and in-survey protections, researchers must still ensure data quality through tried-and-true data evaluations. Fortunately, this process can be enhanced with newer technologies.
Ultimately, the researcher remains the expert on the survey design and is best positioned to identify what constitutes a poor or fraudulent response. While automated solutions are powerful, they carry the risk of flagging too much data (false positives) or too little (false negatives). It is up to the researcher to make informed judgments, based on the study’s specific needs, regarding the acceptable level of risk.
See our guide on how to clean survey data.
AI can be a powerful ally in the fight against fraud. AI-powered tools can be used to access open-ended responses and quantitative data to find “too perfect” responses or generate a coherency score, allowing for easier backend checks.
Beyond the immediate benefits of saving time, energy, and reducing manual errors, these AI tools can detect patterns in the data that won’t be noticeable for humans. For example, if a fraudulent respondent AI tends to overuse certain words, phrases, or response structures.
Protect your valuable market research projects from the damaging effects of survey fraud. Our team specializes in implementing robust strategies to detect and prevent fraudulent responses, ensuring the integrity and accuracy of your data. Don’t risk making critical business decisions based on flawed information.
Contact us today to discuss how we can safeguard your research and help you gather truly reliable insights.
