Companies today want to engage in strategy-led growth without interruptions or fear of malicious behavior. Unfortunately, one of the biggest barriers to research integrity is the cyber threat of bots and fraudulent users. As noted in multiple journals, these cyber threats are ever-increasing, with bots now able to answer open-ended questions with stealth fluency.

Programmers looking to scam for financial incentives and gift cards have built algorithms that extract language from the survey to compose seemingly logical responses. The consequences for research teams are the loss of time (spent cleaning out spam responses), money (if incentives are paid to bots), and diminished data quality (if not every single spam response is cleaned out).

At Fuel Cycle, we understand that research integrity is paramount to producing quality insights. That’s why we have pioneered Research Integrity, our new system for eliminating bad actors and empowering our researchers with tools to outwit even the most sophisticated spammers.

E-mail and Domain Verification

Fuel Cycle protects its clients’ communities by filtering out fraudulent users, bots, and spam. We use both email validations and a scoring API service that calculates how likely a user will engage in fraudulent behavior.

In particular, we track against:

  • High-Risk Email Addresses: tracks abusive emails and stolen identities online
  • Disposable Email Addresses: tracks against stale addresses and domains
  • Fake Account Fraud: fraudsters typically cycle through new domains very quickly, and this detects new domains created specifically for hosting abusive email addresses

Phone Validation

Community moderators can enable additional phone validation for members. There are three screening options available:

  • None: there will be no phone validation
  • Suspicious Users: only users who have been marked as “Suspicious” will be required to validate their phone numbers
  • All Users: all users will be required to validate their phone numbers

Community Member Verification Status

In the member section of the platform, clients will now be able to see verification statuses:

  • Verified: email is verified with all the data points (e-mail, phone, IP verified, etc.)
  • Suspicious: email is verified, however one of the data points is suspicious
  • Fraud: email or phone is not verified

Protection Comes Automatically Enabled

Our Research Integrity program is set to “on” automatically. This is just one of the many ways that Fuel Cycle’s technology is forging the path to data-driven decisions that brands and their teams can trust.

To discover more about the capabilities of our Research Integrity system, get in touch with your Fuel Cycle representative or contact Sales for more info.