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Oh, that they were real….

that would be awesome but unfortunately, the uptick in subscribers yesterday does not correspond with an uptick in website visits or social media posts and some of them look suspicious. Is there a way to tell which ones are real?

They were also all added over the course of three minutes.

We’ve seen this time and again. Email validators are great and definitely advised. While double opt-in can be a solution, we usually don’t recommend it. You end up losing out on quite a few real people by enabling it. 

Before doing anything, you should make sure you are rejecting robots from your site in your server settings, there are also server-side tools you can implement to try and block them. 

When we see an influx of what seem to be fake users (which often come through things like site support chat apps) we will create segments to try to make sure they are having some activity along with the sign up. 

If you create a segment of users that recently signed up, but have no product views, no cart adds, or even sometimes not even Active on Site, that can be an immediate red flag. 

As this is a constant problem for everyone, email validators are a good periodic check, but you need something active as you don’t want to be charged for sending emails to fake addresses. 

There also some tools coming on which consolidate addresses across many different sites and can be very effective in sorting out the bots, but that’s still early days. 

Hope that helps. 


I’ve just confirmed with a couple of security consultants, bots are inflating subscriber counts across klaviyo accounts. I just confirmed three different account with fake users and bots subscribing. 

The question to ask is why klaviyo doesn't have any basic protection for forms… maybe because it allows bots to easily inflate subscriber count adding to their revenue and making it seem like klavyo is doing a better job then it is. I mean this day and age klaviyo could be the one behind the bots. 

 

 

 


Thank you. It totally is helpful.!


Hi @Maggie,

Thanks for sharing this with us.

Have a look at the following thread for some help on identifying fake profiles and cleaning up the account: 

 

I hope that’s helpful.


hm. Thank you. that is interesting and I think adding the double opt in is wise… but these email address don’t look fake… so it’s less about getting rid of obvious fakes and more about how to know if they ARE fake…  does that make sense? they actually look real other than that they were added all within 3 minutes… 


Hi @Maggie,

Thanks for your follow-up note and clarification.

There are plenty of email address validators you can use online to verify if email address(es) are fake or real. Here’s one I found through a quick google search.

I hope that’s helpful. 


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