Believe it or not, market research and specifically paid surveys, have always been a target of research fraud. This is where hackers or fraudulent users try to game the system in order to earn more money off the backs of the researchers. This is very much true for MultiPolls and all other survey platforms.
The initial reaction from many is why care if the survey questions are not 100% answered honestly, well there are many survey platforms on the market, the ones that never cared, will be the ones that will pay less per survey and have surveys that are harder to complete. The reason for this is that these survey platforms have been blacklisted by the best researchers in the industry and thus the honest user base for these platforms are the ones being punished with a subpar experience. Eventually, these users leave for other platforms or abandon survey platforms altogether. In the case of MultiPolls, we are very much protective of our platform and of our legitimate users, and thus strive to keep our app clean from hackers and fraudulent users.
We will review some of the ways these fraudsters attempt to take advantage of survey platforms. We will disclose as much as possible without disclosing some of our little security secrets. So let's get started.
VPN Tricksters - this is the most popular approach to fraud. There are many countries that do not have survey apps, so individuals from these countries try to take surveys of another country while using a VPN. This approach is very easy to catch and usually leads to instant banning from survey platforms.
Speedsters - some try to play the number game with surveys. They believe that if they take as many surveys as possible in a short period of time that they will have better chances of completing more surveys and hence earn more money. So these types of users speed through surveys answering randomly in the hopes they get by. Two things happen, first, the platforms know the average time it takes to complete a survey, so if a user is way underneath this average time, that user will be rejected from the survey. The second thing that happens is that these users get caught answering quality questions wrong. For example “Which animal from the list below lives underwater”, since the user is a speedster, they may select the wrong animal and then are rejected, or worse, the researcher will let them spend more time in the survey to only get rejected at the end.
Liar liar pants on fire - the most common way to beat surveys is through the use of dishonesty. Saying you have children when you don’t, stating you drive a Ford when you drive a Honda, pretending to be vegan when you love your southern meat BBQ. These individuals are a bit trickier to catch, but there are ways. One way is via inconsistencies in their answers throughout various surveys. Another way is to look at the average success rate of surveys and the platform average. So imagine if the platform average of completed surveys is every 3 out of 10 surveys, but a user gets 7 out of 10, that is already a flag. Odds are that the user is answering surveys dishonestly. Another way users get caught is by answering quality questions wrong, but would be correct if the user knew the subject matter well. For example, what is your favorite scent of Old Spice deodorant? The liar may select a scent that doesn’t exist. If this occurs on multiple surveys, well this fraudster is caught and banned.
Secret Sauce - there are other ways that fraudulent users are caught, and in the case of MultiPolls, this is through the implementation of multiple data point analyses. Regular users have a natural pattern when it comes to their behavior, fraudulent users do not and they greatly stand out amongst the normal users. That is as far as we can discuss the secret sauce, already discussing it violates the first rule of the secret sauce, which is we don’t discuss the secret sauce.
Hopefully, this gives you a bit further understanding of all the work that goes into building the security behind survey platforms. Note that there are always constant changes and adjustments to security, as for MultiPolls, we are always making changes and adding more intelligence to our security efforts. The ultimate goal is to reward our honest users and prevent fraudulent users from ruining our relationship with our researchers.