Reducing Form Submission Spam with CAPTCHAS
Online forms are useful for checkout processes, subscriber registration, and customer inquiries. Unfortunately, spammers have abused forms to bombard unsuspecting businesses and individuals with unwanted and often illegal mailings.
CAPTCHAS alleviate most fraudulent form submissions. A CAPTCHA is a small block of text that must be verified by the user prior to submitting a form. Spammers work through automated processes to send thousands of messages at once, and thus never see nor verify the CAPTCHA text.
No verification, no spam.
We recently implemented a CAPTCHA for Duo client Lipkin & Higgins, whose online "Do You Have a Case?" form generated dozens of spam submissions each day. Lipkin staff were forced to spend valuable time identifying authentic submissions, thus reducing efficiency and nearly rendering the online form useless.
The CAPTCHA results are remarkable. According to Mitchell Lipkin, spam traffic from their online forms dropped from roughly 50 messages a day to zero. The Lipkin & Higgins CAPTCHA worked so well that we implemented it on our own site as well as other client sites, such as Shutts & Bowen LLP.
Spammers are constantly devising new ways of sending their malicious mailings. Fortunately, new tools such as CAPTCHAs are constantly emerging to turn the tide.
