How to stop spam bots and fake signups on websites

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“How to stop spam bots on my website?” is a question that runs through the mind of anyone running a digital platform. Spam bots and fake signups are more than just a nuisance. They inflate your numbers, harm your marketing efforts, and create unnecessary hurdles for real users. 

From ineffective user databases to inaccurate marketing metrics, the ripple effects of spam bots and fake signups impact both your backend and user experience. If left unchecked, they could even undermine your site’s reputation and functionality.

In this article, we’ll help you understand what bot traffic is and why it’s a problem. From basic prevention techniques to how to remove spam signups, you’ll learn how to protect your site and maintain a better user experience. 

Let’s get started.

What is a spam bot?

A spam bot is a malicious program that signs up for email lists using fake or real email addresses. These attacks can harm your sender reputation, lower email deliverability rates, and lead to issues like increased spam complaints and security breaches.

What are fake signups?

You can’t search for answers to “how to stop spam bots on my website” if you don’t know what fake signups are, as they eventually increase bot traffic.

Fake signups happen due to spam bots that scour the internet looking for signup forms to fill in.

They fill out these forms — either with fake email addresses or real email addresses. The former might belong to people who don’t want emails from your store. This is especially detrimental, as soon you’ll find your emails being a target for referrals for spam. 

But the question remains — why do spammers register on your site?

There are various reasons these malicious spam bots want to spam your signups. One is that they’re looking for weaknesses in your site to exploit them for further gain. It could also be to gather all of your email addresses and send you spam.

Another important reason is that the spammers want to damage your email campaigns and your all-important deliverability — especially when they use real email addresses. 

For example, if someone receives an unwanted newsletter from you, they might hit the “Spam” button. If this happens often enough, Gmail and other sites could put you on their spam blacklist.

This means that none of your subscribers will see your emails in the future.

How do signup spam bots hurt my email campaigns?

Having a well-stocked email list might seem great. However, this is only true if they are real people who are interested and engaged with your brand. 

Keeping a lot of fake signups on your subscriber list can hurt your email campaigns in many ways.

1. Reduced email deliverability

When you send marketing emails to fake or invalid addresses, your bounce rates increase, signaling to email providers that your campaigns may be spam. 

This can lower your sender reputation as your emails will go straight to the spam folder, making it harder to reach real subscribers.

Additionally, spam traps can blacklist your domain if triggered, leaving your email marketing strategy as good as dead.

Here’s how the email delivery system works and how emails are bounced or sent to the spam folder:

2. Skewed email performance metrics

Another important thing to consider is that your metrics will be way off when you have large amounts of fake signups.

Spam contacts don’t engage with your emails. This means you’ll likely see low figures with the likes of CTR. This can cause you to interpret this as a problem on your end. In turn, you might start making unnecessary changes, such as to your content, prices, or products.

However, real subscribers might still engage with your emails because of these elements. These changes to accommodate lower metrics might start to harm you rather than help you. 

Without accurate ecommerce analysis, you won’t be able to make informed decisions to drive your business forward.

3. Inaccurate customer insights

Another issue you’ll experience is not having a good picture of who your real audience is. With fake signups, it’s difficult to know what they like or dislike.

For example, imagine you sell products mostly geared to a specific location, like the US or UK. If you notice that a significant portion of your contacts are coming from a different region, you could alter your email campaigns.

You might adapt your marketing to appeal to your new audience, even though that audience isn’t real.

Those spam contacts never have and never will interact with your brand. You risk mistakenly adapting your business for them because you don’t know they’re fake.

Here is an example for an email marketing report that shows opens by subscriber country. This can give you an idea on how many emails are being opened by which country:

4. Higher bounce rates

A fake signup from an email spam bot on websites often includes invalid or non-existent email addresses. This results in undelivered emails and higher bounce rates. 

A high bounce rate signals to email service providers that your mailing list may be unreliable. Consequently, this negatively impacts your sender reputation. 

Over time, this can cause your emails to land in spam folders, reducing visibility with legitimate users. This is why you must regularly monitor and clean your email list to maintain campaign performance.

5. Increased costs 

When you work with an email marketing tool, you generally pay by the number of subscribers and contact list. So, when spam bots generate fake signups, they inflate your subscriber count with invalid or inactive email addresses. This means you pay more for subscribers who bring no value.

These fake signups don’t engage with your content or convert into customers. You’re essentially wasting your budget on maintaining an inflated email list. Over time, this can significantly impact your ROI and limit resources for targeting legitimate users. 

6. Wasted resources

Spam bots not only inflate your email lists, but they can also waste valuable team resources.

Your team spends time and effort crafting compelling campaigns, segmenting subscriber lists, and analyzing engagement metrics. When fake signups flood your lists, these efforts are wasted on non-existent or inactive subscribers.

So, instead of focusing on engaging genuine customers, your team is forced to manage inflated metrics, skewed analytics, and irrelevant data caused by spam bots. 

This diversion of resources impacts productivity and reduces campaign effectiveness. Plus, it limits your ability to connect with real users who could drive conversions. 

So, preventing spam bot signups ensures your team’s efforts are directed toward building meaningful relationships with your actual audience.

How to stop fake signups on your website

The dangers of fake signups are clear. You must be thinking now of a question that every business owner and marketer asks: “How to stop spam bots on my website?” 

1. Use reCAPTCHA

Consider using reCAPTCHA to verify your signups. It’s free of charge and isn’t too inconvenient for the user. reCAPTCHA is a fraud detection tool from Google that recognizes bots automatically and stops them from signing up for your emails. This makes it easy to protect your contact list and keep your website from fake signups.

A typical reCAPTCHA form looks like this:

2. Add a double opt-in form 

The double opt-in sends a follow-up email after signups that only asks recipients to click a link. This acts as a confirmation of whether the email actually belongs to the subscriber or not. 

Naturally, spam bots cannot answer the email, so you’ll guarantee that only real people are signing up. This reduces the chances of a hard bounce, which are undeliverable emails. This is because the double-opt-in makes sure that the visitor enters the correct email the first time, eliminating misspelled or invalid emails.

A typical confirmation email looks like this:

3. Use the “Honeypot Captcha” technique

The “Honeypot Captcha” technique is a simple yet effective way to block spam bots. It involves adding a hidden field to your signup forms using CSS. 

This field is invisible to human users but detectable by bots, which often attempt to fill every field in the form. When the hidden field is completed, the form submission is flagged as spam and automatically rejected.

Unlike traditional captchas, Honeypot Captcha doesn’t disrupt the user experience since legitimate users won’t even see the extra field. This makes it an elegant, non-intrusive solution to reduce spam bot activity. 

What’s more, implementing this technique requires little input from your developer and is especially effective when combined with other security measures.

The form below shows how a Honeypot Captcha works:

4. Block traffic from specific countries

This is a bit more of a drastic option, but many top websites use it to avoid spam traffic. You can simply block traffic from certain countries to avoid spam signups if they meet the following conditions:

• You’re moderately or highly certain that spam traffic is coming from these countries
• You’re moderately or highly confident that this traffic won’t convert to paying customers

There are a few ways to get this done. First, on a view level, you can filter out spam traffic from specific countries in Google Analytics. Simply go to your Admin tab, click Filters > Create New Filter, and you’ll be able to block certain countries:

You can also block countries in various ways, such as using .htaccess, with information from the country IP block list.

5. Use a third-party app

Sometimes, it’s better to delegate other responsibilities so that you can focus on the main activity of your business — getting more customers, more sales, and keeping those customers happy.

There are various apps or plugins you can add to your online store that will help block spam signups and won’t require you to do any manual work (and potentially break something on your website).

If you’re on Shopify, for example, you can use apps like Shop Protector to stop spam signups and fake accounts.

If you’re using WordPress/WooCommerce, then you can use something like Wordfence, which is a larger security suite that can also block spam traffic.

6. Check subscription dates

Another smart way to find out whether your website has been attacked by spam bots is to check if you have received too many signups in a short time. 

Examine how many people signed up for your email list in the last 24 hours or a short period of time. If that number is unusually high, most of those signups could be fake. 

The best website spam protection you can deploy in this case is to get an email marketing software that tracks your signups to help you pick out any unusual behavior. 

Omnisend, for example, shows you exactly when a user subscribed to your newsletter. This feature is called the “opt-in date” and is shown with the date and time an email address subscribed to your email list, like in the image below:

You can go through the email list to see if there was a spike in the subscriptions at any given time. Analyzing this data can help you spot the fake email newsletter subscribers that might have likely come from spam bots. 

7. Use multi-step signup forms 

Multi-step signup forms break down the signup process into several steps. Rather than the signup form bearing the fields and subscription button on the same page, multi-step forms introduce additional steps and actions to get the users to spend more time on the form. 

Not only can multi-step signup forms help you to collect more data, but by introducing additional steps, they can also stop bots from submitting forms, thereby preventing fake signups from getting to your email list. Plus, such signup forms will discourage manual spammers who would rather fill in fake contact details at once than go through a multi-step signup process. 

The example below shows a popup with a multi-step signup form. The popup only bears a “Yes, Please” button that you have to click to reveal the signup field:

Set up your popup forms this way to stop spam bots on your website from subscribing to your newsletter. 

8. Email address verification 

Another way to stop fake signups is by integrating real-time email validation tools into your signup forms. This helps you check if the email domain exists and is connected to a valid inbox. 

For example, let’s say someone enters “[email protected].” The tool will detect that the domain is invalid and block the submission. 

These tools also identify disposable or temporary email addresses often used by bots to help you maintain a clean subscriber list. Some validation systems even flag suspicious patterns, such as email addresses with random strings of characters. 

This verification process ensures your email list only contains authentic subscribers, reducing bounce rates and protecting your sender reputation. 

This is what suspicious email addresses typically look like:

9. Restrict disposable email addresses

Spam bots often use disposable email addresses to bypass verification processes. These temporary emails expire after a short period, making them useless for meaningful engagement. 

To prevent them, you can integrate tools like BlockDisposableEmail, Kickbox, or Mailcheck into your signup forms. If someone attempts to register using a disposable email like “[email protected],” these tools can instantly identify and block the address. 

They work by referencing a comprehensive database of known disposable email domains. This ensures that only valid, long-term addresses are allowed.

By restricting disposable emails, you reduce the risk of fake signups inflating your subscriber count and harming your email campaigns. This also ensures better data quality, allowing you to focus time and resources on legitimate users.

This is how a temporary email address would look:

10. IP address tracking and blacklisting

With IP address tracking, you can identify suspicious activity by monitoring signups from specific IPs. If an IP shows excessive signups within a short period, it’s likely a spam bot. 

You can use tools like Cloudflare or Akismet to monitor and detect such patterns in real time.

Once flagged, these IPs can be blacklisted to prevent further malicious activity. For example, if “192.168.1.1” is associated with a spam signup, it can be blocked from accessing your website.

This flow chart by Spamhaus breaks down this process:

How to remove spam signups

Keeping your email list clean should be an ongoing process. It can be a challenge if you have thousands of subscribers, but deleting fake signups is critical to the success of your email marketing.

To remove spam signups:

• Find passive subscribers with segmentation: Segment users that remain inactive for six months and remove them. You can do that in Omnisend — watch the second part of the video below for step-by-step instructions.
• Use your ESP’s email list cleaning service: Omnisend’s email List Cleaning service applies artificial intelligence for constant email validation. It also includes custom grammar and inactive email checks to keep your bounce rates down.
• Manually look through email addresses: Sometimes, you’ll notice that some of them look strange. You can check them out with CleanTalk. This tool has a blacklist of almost six million spam emails and emails that have been abused by bots.
• Double-check the addresses of cart abandoners: Spam bots can add products to carts and then leave without finishing the purchase. See if the emails of those visitors look strange or repeat many times.
• Get your list validated by Mailgun: It’s an email verification service that runs numerous checks for every email address. Watch the video below for step-by-step instructions on how to use it.

As promised, we have a video with steps to remove fake signups.

In this one below, you’ll find out how to a) use Mailgun for verification and b) remove passive emails by segmenting users in Omnisend:

But the bottom line here is — the sooner you start protecting your signup forms, the better. It’s one of the strongest ways to protect your website from spam bots and fake signups.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, spam bots have become an everyday issue for ecommerce marketers. However, you shouldn’t panic if you realize that you’re hosting several fake signups as there are ways to remove them and stop them.

Again, to protect your website from spam bots, here’s a quick run-through on what you can do:

• Use reCAPTCHA
• Add a double opt-in form
• Use the “Honeypot Captcha” technique
• Block traffic from specific countries
• Use a third-party app
• Check subscription dates
• Use multi-step signup forms
• Verify email addresses
• Restrict disposable email addresses
• Track and blacklist IP address

Also, make sure that you have an ESP that’s well-equipped with tools to deal with spam bots and other malicious actors. Start using Omnisend and do your email marketing with confidence.

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