#lead generation 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. 

Affiliate marketing, as a concept, is revolutionary. It enables businesses to make money by using the influence of popular online publishers. When the right affiliates are involved, affiliate marketing not only drives more sales, but also boosts long-term brand performance metrics like brand recall value and trustworthiness of the brand.  

At the same time, by design, affiliate marketing ensures the publishers bring their A-game in getting brands maximum visibility and ensuring their audiences view them in a positive light. After all, more sales also translate to better affiliate payouts for the publishers.  

Thanks to this symbiotic nature of affiliate marketing, it is nearly the perfect marketing activity. Nearly.  

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.