How To Prevent Fraud In Custom Online Panel Research?

Online fraud is a challenge that every organization has been facing since the emergence of e-commerce in the 1990s and the threats are increasing rapidly with each passing year. According to Experian, 55% of companies have increased their budget in fraud prevention. This increasing fraud has also raised challenges in the market research industry. On average, nearly 15 to 30% of research data is fraudulent. To protect your customer panel research from these fraudulent activities, it’s important to understand how research fraud is evolving and increasing and the way to prevent your survey from custom panel research fraud.

Who are these fraudsters?

Fraudsters are the unqualified people who enter into research surveys to make sums of money. Some of the major threats to data quality are bots and cheaters. Sometimes bots complete the surveys or an unqualified person will enter into the survey on behalf of someone else multiple times. Without appropriate security features it gets difficult to identify these fraudsters and it requires thorough vigilance and checks and balances.

How to spot these fake panelists?

Identifying the honest panelist while conducting online surveys is basically a difficult task since we only have virtual contact with them. To increase the effectiveness of the survey response, one must exclude the duplicate respondent and the false identity from entering the research survey. Excluding those respondents who answer faster than the estimated time, excluding the respondents that answer the questions without paying attention, these are some of the measures that are adopted.