What is lead fraud?
Lead fraud covers records that misrepresent what they are: fabricated contact details, falsified consent, or inquiries presented as new when they are not.
The common forms are distinct and worth separating. A fabricated lead contains invented or stolen contact information. A falsified-consent lead describes a real person who never agreed to be contacted. A recycled lead is a genuine older inquiry resold as fresh.
These require different defences. Fabrication is detectable through data-consistency and validation checks. Recycling is detectable by tracking inquiry timestamps and matching against records already seen. Consent problems are generally not detectable from the record at all, and require documentation from the vendor.
Fraud detection is distinct from quality scoring, though the two are often bundled. A lead can be entirely genuine, fully consented, and still very unlikely to convert. Treating a low conversion score as evidence of fraud conflates two different problems and leads to unfair vendor disputes.
Related terms
- Recycled lead — A recycled lead is a genuine but older consumer inquiry that is resold as though it were new, without disclosing how long ago the original inquiry was made or how many buyers already received it.
- Identity resolution — Identity resolution is the process of matching a lead record to a known individual in a reference data set, so that attributes which were not submitted with the lead can be attached to it.
- Shared vs exclusive leads — An exclusive lead is sold to one buyer. A shared lead is sold to several buyers simultaneously, so the consumer is contacted by multiple agents and each buyer competes for the same person.