Contact Form Spam Blacklist
If all online businesses have one thing in common, it is that we are all under a constant barage of spam. While email providers like Microsoft and Google have made incredible strides over the decades fighting email spam and phone companies have continuously improved blocking or labeling spam phone calls / text messages, one form of spam appears to be winning: Contact Form Spam.
Contact Form Spam is where a bot or real human being fills out a contact form on a website in order to push a spam message, solict website traffic, falsely point out a business is doing online marketing wrong, or gain inbound phone calls. This type of spam can be used for more than just your common grade spam, it has also been used as a vector in phishing attacks and in social engineering hacks.
Contact Form Spam can wreak havoc on a business by:
- Increasing PPC ad costs.
- Losing sales by causing an email system to ignore all emails from a contact form.
- Increasing sales management costs.
- Skewing conversion rate optimization data.
- Convincing a busness to abandon their current course of action in digital marketing (most often SEO).
- Putting garbage entries into a form database / CRM.
- Selling fraudulent services.
- Using link clicks to download malicious software.
Traditionally Contact Form Spam is fought by taking measures against automated form fills from spam bots including using Recaptcha technology, questions, and honeypots. While these “prove you are human” techniques work to drastically cull the amount of contact form spam, they do not stop all of it. Spammers wishing to reach a business decision maker’s inbox or gain their attention by appearing in a database / CRM viewed by the decision maker can simply hire humans to spam the inboxes of their target victims.
This type of spam is successful at reaching the database / CRM / inbox because there is either no effective countermeasure to keep humans from filling out a contact form or such countermeasures are lacking in preverbial teeth. This is due to the fact that most contact forms exist to only be conduits of information not arbiters of that information. That means there is no effective solution deployed by form software makers including some of the largest names such as Gravity Forms and Ninja Forms to help you fight off human spammers. You may even assume such a countermeasure is unneeded since email systems will filter out the spam. However, this is slightly inaccurate as Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Zoho, and other email providers tend to filter out all emails coming from a known spam source. If that spam source is your website then your contact form fills from real customers will not reach your inbox.
Some form software systems and CRMs allow you to block entries on a per-field basis. While most of these are rudimentary in nature, they can be an effective tool. The problem is that even if you have such an option you need to first be spammed before determining that a contact is spam.
Enter, the Contact Form Spam Blacklist.
This blacklist is created from data entered in to contact forms across various test websites we have built and turned into contact form spam honeypots. These websites appear to be real businesses in various industries and previously served as a test bed for various technologies and SEO tactics before being retooled to be our human contact form spam honeypots.
The blacklist only includes data for contact forms that employ various anti-spam bot countermeasures such as Recaptcha technology to effectively determine that this spam has likely been human entered. We attempt to gather all details on a spammer including first and last name, email, phone number, and website for the list. Our recommendation is to never block on a name but on an email address, phone number, or website of a known spammer. Each entry also contains a spammer’s “Level” which increases from a Nusance, to an Aggitation, to Notorious. Notorious spammers have either a phone number, email address, or website associated with spam multiple times in our database and/or were found spamming on the web via comment spam or other types of spam during a sweep. Our hope is that by providing levels we can push back against false positives.
What is considered spam in our database:
1. Classic spam (i.e. porn, Nigerian scam, phishing attacks, etc…)
2. SEO, Web Design, or Marketing sales messaging
3. Unsolicited sales messaging from industry providers
4. Gibberish
This data should be useful at the very least in correcting conversion rate calculations or removing spam from a CRM / database. If your form software or CRM allows you to, this data will also be useful in blocking known human spammers from getting through to your internal systems.
| FIRST NAME | LAST NAME | PHONE | WEBSITE | LEVEL | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arpita | Chakrabarty | arpitalinkbuilder@gmail.com | (877) 721-2073 | https://pndoutreach.com/ | Notorious |
| Amit | Kumar | generateseolead@gmail.com | (965) 442-6180 | http://generateseolead.com/ | Notorious |
| Sarah | Williams | sarahwilliamsmkt@gmail.com | n/a | n/a | Notorious |
| Alley | Trew | alleytrew.uk@gmail.com | (089) 440-2284 | https://www.freelancer.com/ | Nusance |
| Sanjoy | Bagdi | sanjoy.seoblogger@gmail.com | (825) 041-5727 | https://qualitylinkbuilders.com/ | Notorious |
| Avijit | Chakrabortty | Avijit.linkbuilders@gmail.com | (973) 528-6665 | https://qualitylinkbuilders.com/ | Notorious |
| Kristie | Jones | kristie.seoexpert@gmail.com | (738) 472-1282 | https://www.freelancer.in/ | Nusance |
| Tanmay | Pramanik | tanmay.linkbuilders@gmail.com | (967) 931-8720 | https://qualitylinkbuilders.com | Notorious |
| Ranajit | Das | ranajitseoconsultant@gmail.com | (974) 914-0362 | http://www.linkbuildersteam.com | Nusance |
| Dallin | Porter | porter.dallin@galacticfed.co | (000) 000-0000 | https://www.galacticfed.com/ | Nusance |
| Antonioujp | AntoniohgfPU | u.se.rz.a.l.e.vsk.i.ja.2.22.0.1@gmail.com | (514) 052-7218 | https://sfilm.by/ | Nusance |
| Agrohimosb | AgrohimutwKA | ag.roh.i.mi.y.a.b.y.2021t.o.p@gmail.com | (480) 022-6604 | https://agro-himiya.by/ | Nusance |
| Sandraglusy | SandraglusyJO | sandraExila@azclip.net | (446) 333-6408 | n/a | Nusance |
| BruteBankCod | BruteBankCodHS | logincodertop@gmail.com | (517) 484-3602 | https://t.me/flash_code_tool | Nusance |
| Stanley | Kew | stocchemmranlichi@rambler.ru | (774) 472-7670 | n/a | Nusance |
| Ruel | Mitchell | rmitchell@equipmentfundingexperts.com | (310) 929-9335 | https://www.equipmentfundingexperts.com/ | Notorious |
| Linda | Miller | noreply@noreply.com | (555) 555-1212 | n/a | Nusance |
Legal Note: A person or brand being shown on this list is not proof that they are in fact a spammer as anyone can fill out contact form information. Some spammers may use UGC / Marketplace websites instead of their own, these websites are highly unlikely to be complacent in spam tactics. While this data has proven useful to us and our clients in determining spam form fills, it should not be used to disparage any person or business. Use caution when utilizing this data to ensure you are not infact blocking actual potential customers.