The Hidden Threat to Your Funnels: What the Global Ad Fraud Report Reveals About Lead Generation Today

Every form fill doesn’t equal a real person.

According to Anura’s Fraud Report, 25% of all lead generation traffic is fake. Submitted by bots, click farms or fraud rings posing as real users. That means 1 in every 4 leads is draining budget, not driving business.

In the world of performance marketing, conversion rates are everything. But if your conversions aren’t real, your decisions aren’t either.

What Is Lead Generation Fraud and Why You Might Be Missing It

Lead generation fraud happens when fake visitors fill out your forms with junk data but get counted as conversions and quietly eat away at your ROI. It can be as obvious as [email protected], or as convincing as human-like bots filling in every field with plausible details. It looks like success. It messes up everything.

Fraud in lead generation is profitable. Just not for you. Here’s how the bad actors cash in:

• Fake affiliates submit junk leads to claim CPA commissions.
  You pay $50 per “lead,” but it’s just a bot filling out your form 100 times. That’s $5,000 gone… for nothing.

• Sophisticated bots mimic human behavior, skewing your campaign metrics and optimization algorithms on fake conversions. Your media spend shifts toward the worst traffic, and you don’t even realize it.

• Fraud farms generate and resell fake leads downstream. Your partners think the leads are real because often they are using real information stolen from personal identification. Your reputation takes the hit when no one converts and/or you are out of compliance.

Why is it dangerous?

Because fake leads don’t bounce. They move through your funnel, waste your sales team’s time, trigger automated workflows, and dirty up your CRM.

5 Red Flags That You’re Capturing Fake Leads

Even with a beautiful form and well-thought-out plan, fraud can sneak in.

Watch for these signs:

1. Lead volume is too perfect. If 20 people fill out your form in 30 seconds, they’re likely not people.

2. Disposable emails or gibberish names. Think: [email protected]

3. High conversions, low closing rate. Sales says your leads are junk? Believe them.

4. Same IP, different leads. That’s a prime example of a bot loop.

5. Time-on-form is weird. Sub-1-second completions? Definitely not human behavior.

What You Can Do About It

Here’s the good news: You can stop lead gen fraud, without sacrificing conversions.

Fraud prevention includes:

• Real-time validation: Blocking fake traffic before it submits forms.

• Advanced detection tools: Identifying sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) using advanced tools, not just blacklists.

• Deeper visibility: Knowing what sources, browsers, and devices fraudsters are exploiting.

• Platform integration: Pairing a fraud detection platform with your lead capture tool to filter out fake leads and score real ones.

Inside the Global Ad Fraud Report: What’s Really Happening

The data doesn’t lie, and we are here to give it to you straight: Fraud is thriving.

• $200 billion is what ad fraud is projected to steal globally by 2028. Right now, it’s draining $383 million per day from digital ad budgets, and it’s only getting worse.

• In Q4 2024, fraud in the U.S. peaked at 31%, with December seeing the highest spike. The surge aligned with holiday budgets and ecommerce campaigns.

• 25% of lead generation traffic was fraudulent, with fake form fills, bot-submitted data, and invalid contact info wasting ad budgets, sales time, and damaging company reputation.

What’s worse? Most of it wasn’t caught until after it entered the funnel.

So… How Do You Protect Your Funnel?

Here’s the short answer:
Validate everything. In real time.

In practice, this means:

• Block bad traffic before it sees your form.

• Use real-time fraud detection like Anura to stop fake leads before they submit. With the industry’s first 99.999% Accuracy Guarantee, Anura flags traffic as fraudulent only when it's truly awful. No false positives. Just real results.

• Watch your data closely: educate yourself on the warning signs.

• Capture leads smartly: With a funnel-tool like Heyflow, you can build logic flows to route or reject based on suspicious behavior.

The Bottom Line: Fraud Kills Funnels

You work too hard to attract the right visitors. Don’t let fraud mess with your ROI.

Get the full picture.
Download the 2024 Fraud Report