Fake leads are one of the most expensive problems in paid advertising. Whether you’re running Google Ads, Facebook Lead Ads, or affiliate campaigns, fraudulent form submissions drain your budget, corrupt your CRM data, and waste your sales team’s time. Industry reports estimate that 10-25% of leads generated through paid channels contain invalid or fabricated contact information — and phone numbers are often the weakest link.
Real-time phone validation at the form level catches fake leads before they enter your funnel, protecting your ad spend and giving your sales team only contacts worth calling.
Why Fake Leads Happen
Bot Traffic
Automated bots fill out lead forms at scale. Some target competitors’ ads to burn their budget. Others harvest form submission confirmations for phishing or spam.
Incentivized Submissions
Contests, giveaways, and gated content attract low-intent submissions. Users enter throwaway phone numbers to access the content without intending to engage further.
Affiliate Fraud
Performance marketing campaigns that pay per lead incentivize volume over quality. Unscrupulous publishers fabricate leads using VoIP numbers, recycled contacts, or automated form fillers.
Manual Junk
Real humans entering fake phone numbers to avoid being contacted is more common than you’d think. “555-555-5555” and similar patterns show up in every lead database.
How Phone Validation Catches Fake Leads
When you validate the phone number on a lead form in real time, you can detect:
- Invalid numbers — Numbers that don’t exist or fail format validation
- Disconnected lines — Numbers that were once valid but are now suspended or deactivated
- VoIP and disposable numbers — Bulk-purchased numbers from services commonly used for fraud
- Landlines — If your follow-up is SMS-based, landlines are useless leads
- Geographic mismatches — A phone number from one region combined with a user IP from another may indicate fraud
CheckThatPhone returns all of these signals in a single API call that completes in milliseconds — fast enough to validate before the form submission completes.
Implementation Strategy
1. Validate on Form Submit
Add an API call to your lead form handler. Before saving the lead to your CRM or triggering a follow-up sequence, validate the phone number. Reject or flag submissions that fail validation.
2. Set Rules by Campaign
Different campaigns may warrant different thresholds:
- High-value B2B leads: Block VoIP entirely, require mobile numbers
- Consumer lead gen: Allow VoIP from established carriers, block disposable services
- Contest entries: Accept any valid number but flag VoIP for lower priority follow-up
3. Track Quality by Source
Log validation results alongside your attribution data. Over time, you’ll identify which ad channels, publishers, or campaigns produce the highest rates of invalid numbers — and reallocate budget accordingly.
The Economics of Lead Validation
If you generate 5,000 leads per month at $20 CPL and 15% are fake, that’s $15,000 per month in wasted ad spend. Validating every lead at $0.001 per lookup costs $5. The ROI isn’t subtle.
Getting Started
Fake leads erode your marketing ROI from the inside. By adding phone validation to your lead capture forms, you catch fraudulent submissions in real time and ensure your sales team only works contacts that are real and reachable. Read the API documentation to integrate validation into your forms, or explore pricing plans to start protecting your ad budget today.