How we’re keeping fraudulent participants out of your studies

Discover how we maintain an industry-low fraud rate by preventing and detecting fraudulent participants.

Jim Goh
Aug 4, 2025
Fraud is probably the most frustrating thing you’ll encounter as a researcher.
 

Hosting a research interview and trying to figure out whether your participant is misrepresenting themself is awkward, confusing, and a huge time sink.

But industry-wide, it’s happening more and more. So why does our panel maintain its industry-low fraud rate of <1%?

It’s because tackling fraud is our number one priority. We never want you to think: “Is this person who they say they are?” A lot of work goes on behind the scenes to build that level of confidence in our participants' quality.

Imagine a duck: calm on the surface, but paddling furiously below.

That’s us. As participant fraud becomes more sophisticated, we’re constantly working behind the scenes to strengthen our defences. Though all you'll notice is the high bar for participant quality and how easy it is to gather meaningful insights.

We think about our approach to fraud in three parts: Prevention, Detection, Response. Let’s dive into what’s involved at each stage.

 

 

Prevention

Keeping fake participants out of the panel

Prevention-1

We see lots of fraud - but our customers don’t. That’s because we identify most fraud before the fakers make it to our panel.

Behind the scenes, a mix of advanced anti-fraud techniques and common-sense checks ensure we’re only welcoming high-quality participants to our panel.

Phone verification
We want to know participants' contact info is real, so we’ll block fake or cloud-generated numbers. It’s simple - if you can’t prove that your phone number is tied to a SIM that’s been issued in your country, you won’t be able to join our panel.

IP address checks
If someone says they’re in Chicago but their IP says otherwise? That’s usually a sign the participant is fraudulent, so they won’t be included as part of our panel. We also monitor usage of VPNs to identify how legitimate a participant is likely to be.

Work email verification every 90 days
Whenever a participant submits a professional email to be included as part of our B2B panel, we’ll check the domain is legitimate. Then, every three months, we require the participant to verify their email address again. We expect our panel to leave jobs and start new roles: this is how we keep their information up to date.

Profile locks
Participants can’t just change roles whenever it suits them. Instead, updates are allowed periodically, making it hard to spoof your way into a project that requires a certain job title. If you were a product manager yesterday, you can’t suddenly start calling yourself a CTO.

Screener consistency checks
We look for contradictory answers to screeners. When a participant submits two or more screeners that don’t build a plausible view of their identity, they won’t be included in our panel.

 

 

 

Detection

Hiding fakers from your participant results page

Detection-3

As always, some bad actors slip through the cracks. But those that do won’t get far. Our second layer of defence comes into play after fraudulent participants apply for projects.

Bank-grade ID verification
Whenever a high-risk participant responds to a screener, we put them through ID verification. This involves asking participants who apply to prove their identity with a government-issued ID and a live selfie. This is the same technology online banks use to prevent fraud.

Matching that prioritizes quality
When we match participants to research studies, we always prioritize sending our first batches of matching comms to the highest-quality participants who appear to be the best fit for your study. Following batches of matching comms will be sent to those who might be a good fit. Participants who have been flagged for fraud (along with those who don’t appear to be a good fit) won’t be invited to take part in your study.

Payment protections
The payment provider we work with to issue incentives identifies devices that have previously been flagged as fraudulent. This final line of defence helps prevent researchers release incentive payments to known bad actors.

Human reviewers
It’s not all about technology! Our fraud detection team watches projects that are likely targets for fraud and manually weeds out participants who show the signs before researchers see them. This team also helps train our AI, by feeding them new examples of fraud, so our system finds it easier to spot these patterns next time.

AI monitoring
Our systems learn from every new fraud case, making detection faster and smarter over time. We’re continually retraining our anti-fraud AI, and every detected instance of fraud makes it more powerful.

 

To recap, if a participant trips any of these wires, they are removed before their profile is shared as part of your list of matched participants.

 

 

Response

How we react and learn quickly

Response-3

Even with all the safeguards, we occasionally see localized flare-ups of fraud. When that happens, we move fast to remove the participants and ensure future instances are detected quickly.

  • Fraudsters are immediately removed from the platform and can’t apply to more projects
  • You only pay for fraud-free sessions with participants
  • Whenever fraud is reported, we investigate the account and audit all others that show similar attributes or behaviors

 

The tactics fraudulent participants use to access our panel get more advanced, so the protections we’re building get more advanced too. With more than seven years of fighting fraud under our belt, our panel quality defences have grown to become some of the tightest in the industry.

 

 

Fraud will always be our top priority

Fraud Stats-3

The quality of our panel means we’re often the go-to choice for researchers looking for high-quality participants for video and voice-based qualitative research.

When fraud appears in these research studies, it’s often pretty obvious. And that’s why you couldn’t run meaningful qual research with low-quality quant panels. As soon as a participant is invited to speak openly, there’s nowhere for them to hide.

Every safeguard, every flag, every fraud review - they all work in the background to make sure you’re having high-quality research sessions with genuine participants. Participants whose insights you trust to help you build better products.

Fraud will always be our top priority because we’ve built our reputation on it. 

 

Want to improve the quality of participants in your studies? Book a demo to see how we tackle fraud, or post your first project.

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