#lead fraud

Welcome to the world of Pay Per Lead! A more trustworthy and monetized model. 

When impressions were being faked, clicks were being hijacked, and brands were receiving barely any conversions. Hence marketers, especially in tier-1 markets like the United States, decided to do what any rational person would do. They stopped paying for clicks and started paying for outcomes. Fill a form, generate a lead, get paid. Simple, accountable, fraud-proof. 

The moment payment moved to the lead event; some affiliates simply moved their operation there too. Suddenly, forms were being filled by scripts, credentials were being recycled, and conversion metrics were spiking in ways that looked extraordinary on a dashboard and meant absolutely nothing in a sales pipeline. 

The model designed to eliminate fraud became the next frontier for it. 

In this blog, we will discover – 

What is lead fraud and how affiliates exploit PPL campaigns 

What our latest analysis revealed on lead fraud

Why your current measures are not enough to tackle lead fraud 

What a holistic ad traffic validation solution solves in lead gen campaign 

What is Lead Fraud and How Affiliates Exploit Lead Gen Campaigns

Imagine opening a lemonade stand and suddenly getting 500 “customers” who ask for lemonade, write down their names, and then disappear before buying anything. Sounds exciting at first until you realize nobody actually wanted lemonade.  

That’s exactly what lead generation fraud looks like in digital marketing. 

In lead generation fraud, fake demand is created by fraudsters by filling up lead forms with credentials without having any real intent of buying any product/service. This means your brand who has partnered with affiliates are exploiting your marketing campaigns by filling out multiple fake leads and very subtly shifting the burden of non-conversion on sales team. 

Lead fraud happens in two ways – 

Fake Leads

Completely made-up entries with false details, often created by bots. They look like leads but have no real user behind them.  

Punched Leads

Manually filled leads using random or reused information to hit targets. They seem real but don’t convert when contacted.

What is the Mechanic Behind Lead Fraud?

Lead fraud is not just another move to pollute your campaigns; it is a very strategic one that is noticeable only when the commission is attributed to partners. 

Here’s how affiliate lead generation fraud typically works: 

Fake lead generation

Affiliates submit fabricated or bot-generated leads using fake names, emails, and phone numbers, often sourced from data dumps or auto-filled by scripts, to hit volume targets and earn commissions. 

Incentivized traffic manipulation

Real users are paid or incentivized (cash, gift cards) to fill out forms with no genuine purchase intent, inflating lead counts while producing zero conversion value for the advertiser. 

Lead recycling

Old or previously sold leads are repackaged and resubmitted, sometimes with slightly altered details, to collect duplicate commissions from advertisers who lack deduplication checks. 

Cookie stuffing / attribution hijacking

Affiliates drop tracking cookies on users’ browsers without their knowledge, falsely claiming credit for leads or conversions that originated organically or through other channels. 

Device/IP farming

Using emulators, VPNs, rotating proxies, or device farms, affiliates simulate multiple unique users from a single operation, bypassing basic device fraud filters and generating large volumes of fraudulent leads at scale. 

You have done everything by the book. 

Made a fully optimized, well-researched campaign, targeted a precise audience, and got engaging creatives made by your team. Even your dashboards show that the campaigns are performing great. 

But what you hear from your sales team is a whole different story. 

“Fake leads, wrong phone numbers, uninterested people, never heard of the brand before”

Leaving your performance credibility being questioned. 

It’s not that your strategy is flawed. You’ve done exactly what a high-performing Meta lead gen campaign demands, what every marketer does. 

The problem lies in where those leads are being captured from. 

Meta’s native lead forms are built for speed and simplicity, which makes them great for collecting high volumes of leads. However, since Meta is a walled garden, a closed ecosystem,  

This gap in visibility is what allows fake sign-ups, bots, and low-intent leads to slip through. And by the time sales flag the problem, it’s too late, the budgets are spent, the data is messy, and the targets are affected. 

The way forward isn’t to stop running Meta campaigns; it’s to change the lead-capturing strategy. By shifting traffic to dedicated landing pages, you bring leads into an environment you control, where real-time validation and ad fraud solutions can help you ensure that only genuine, sales-ready leads make it through. This means cleaner CRMs, stronger conversion rates, and a lot fewer tense conversations in post-campaign reviews. 

Continue reading further to know how it works. 

Understanding The Problem: Why Meta Lead Gen Campaigns Produce Junk Leads?

Meta’s native lead forms are optimized for speed, efficiency, and ease for a seamless user experience. Users can easily fill in the form with a couple of taps, often using pre-filled information extracted from their profiles. While this effortless experience boosts form submissions, it also makes the campaigns vulnerable to lead generation fraud. 

This ease in the process makes it even more easier for the bots, or click farms (low-paid workers), to fill in the forms.  

Moreover, the bots easily bypass the basic level checks like CAPTCHAs and OTPs using CAPTCHA solvers available at just one click. That is why, marketers relying solely on these efforts to prevent junk leads lack behind. 

Here’s how junk leads fill in, when left unchecked: 

Invalid or fake phone numbers and emails – Many users submit temporary, outdated, or fabricated contact details. Some don’t even review the pre-filled information before hitting submit, leaving you with leads that cannot be contacted or verified. 

Bots and click farms – Automated scripts and low-paid workers mass-fill thousands of forms within a matter of few minutes. While they make your numbers look impressive on the dashboards, they have zero intent to buy and generate zero actual revenue.

Zero-intent leads – These are people who sign up purely out of curiosity to know what’s next, boredom, or by mistake. Since there’s little to no effort involved, they have no genuine interest and rarely convert into paying customers. 

Repeated or duplicate submissions – The same user, or an automated system, submits identical details multiple times. This inflates your lead count, clogs your CRM with fake leads, and wastes valuable time of sales team resources on the same invalid contacts. 

The combination of these factors completely disrupts the campaign goals, skewing performance metrics, and manipulating further campaign optimizations or remarketing efforts.  

So, if you have ever wondered why your Meta lead generation campaigns have great CPL but disappointing conversions, above mentioned are likely the reason, the system is rewarding volume, not quality. 

4,000 Leads. 18 Real Buyers. That’s the Problem. 

“More leads = more business” is one of the most expensive myths in affiliate marketing, especially in the MENA region. 

Affiliate campaigns promise scale, speed, and volume. Dashboards light up. Weekly reports look impressive. But when those leads hit your CRM, the reality is far less glamorous: duplicates, unreachable contacts, irrelevant users, and leads generated purely to meet affiliate targets, not to convert. 

4,000 Leads. 18 Real Buyers. That’s the Problem. 

“More leads = more business” is one of the most expensive myths in affiliate marketing, especially in the MENA region. 

Affiliate campaigns promise scale, speed, and volume. Dashboards light up. Weekly reports look impressive. But when those leads hit your CRM, the reality is far less glamorous: duplicates, unreachable contacts, irrelevant users, and leads generated purely to meet affiliate targets, not to convert. 

Karim Bekka, Business Director at Assembly Global, shared a perfect example of how this gap plays out in the real world. A real estate brand demanded 4,000 leads every week. What they actually got? Just 18 genuinely qualified prospects. The rest clogged CRMs, wasted sales hours, and quietly eroded trust between marketing and revenue teams. 

Having a sound digital growth plan is perhaps the most surefire way for any modern business to succeed. Today, companies have several methods to generate leads at their disposal. They enjoy room for experimentation and finding a lead-generation tactic that suits their needs and abilities.

However, success with online lead generation heavily depends on the quality of leads. If a business manages to generate a large quantity of leads but the leads are fake or irrelevant, it can quickly lead to a different outcome.

Techniques used to commit lead generation fraud

1. Bot Fraud

Bot fraud is most prevalent in the case of cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-lead (CPL) lead generation campaigns. The fraudsters operate large networks of bots that they use to commit click fraud. However, the use of bots has been recorded in cases of social media fraud (generating fake engagement or followers). In other cases, bots have been used to fill fake information into lead generation forms. The ultimate objective of using bots is to generate a fake lead and attribute its credit to the fraudsters who get paid by the advertiser.

Bot fraud is one of the oldest techniques used by fraudsters and has evolved greatly over time. Modern-day bots are backed by complex algorithms that enable them to emulate human behavior and scam advertisers.