Who's really behind that signup? [the hidden cost of fake users]

Every new sign up should feel like a win, it’s a business celebration moment that validates what you do as a business and a sign that your marketing’s working.

But what if they’re not real? 🤔

What if a chunk of your “users” are secretly bots, spammers, or even the same person signing up again and again with fake details?

Fake account creation isn’t a growth hack, it's a data heist happening in plain sight 🥷

And if you’re not watching out for it, you’re the one that ends up getting played.

Welcome to the world of fake account creation, the silent saboteur of your marketing performance, your conversion data, and ultimately, your business's growth 📉

Whether you’re offering free trials, gated content or new customer deals, fake sign ups aren’t just an annoyance. It’s a threat to how you scale.

In this article, we cover how fake accounts come to exist, the damage they can do to your marketing and product funnels, who’s the most at risk, and how tools like Hitprobe can help you detect and stop them before they cost you real money.

Whether you’re running paid ads or trying to build an honest user base, this is one problem you can’t afford to ignore. Lets get into it 🚀

TL;DR: What you need to know when you’re short on time

The problem: Fake accounts are created to exploit user incentives, spam business systems and inflate your metrics. They come from bots, bad actors, and even regular users who find loopholes to avoid paying you what’s rightfully yours. Think:

• Fake email farming, all designed to get as many free trials as possible before the gates close
• The same person, annoyingly signing up again, and again…and again for those “new user” benefits you’re offering
• Bots creating junk profiles that flood your CRM, wasting operational time and effort and ultimately, breaking your sign up flow

The solution: If you're reading this, your email address validation probably isn’t cutting it. You need:

• Device fingerprinting to detect repeat signups from the same user
• IP monitoring to identify proxy networks and suspicious IP clusters 
• Session level insights that link user behavior, not just form fields 
• Real-time detection and tagging with tools like Hitprobe (👋)

A headache that’s dragged on for months can disappear in a day, with Hitprobe.

Why fake accounts exist in the first place

Your signup form wasn’t built to stop criminals, gatekeep resources or say no more than it says “come on in” 👋

It was built to reduce friction, whilst giving you the data you need to segment your users neatly - those new users need more love and TLC than existing users, and rightly deserve to be treated so.

You made it easy to sign up, because that’s what everyone else's product does, right? 💭

Remove complicated or unnecessary steps, ask for less information, get users in fast.

And it works…until it doesn’t.

Because the same frictionless experience is also exactly what bots, fake users or repeat offenders are looking for. 

Once they know you offer something with value, whether it’s a free trial, early access to services, or even a discounted period, they’ll test how many times they can get through your system before you catch on ⚠️

Here’s our first tip: You can’t trust email addresses alone, especially not one that ends in “mailinator.com”, “guerrillamail.com’ or “yopmail.com” 💡

Most platforms treat each email signup as a unique user, which means a single person could in theory, spin up lets say 20 accounts with very minor alterations, rinse your onboarding funnel, then disappear before they ever pay you a penny for services they’ve probably been happily using.

And what’s worse…your metrics tell you you’re growing 📈

How fake signups ruin your funnel

Lets assume for a minute that you’re running ads on Google or Meta, and you’ve spent weeks dialing in your audiences, building some pretty decent landing pages, and tweaking your offer.

And finally, signups are rolling in thick and fast 🙌

You’re winning, right?

But a portion of those users never “activate”, or they activate, but never pay.

Or worse still, they trigger all your onboarding emails, you incur trial costs out of your good nature, but they never had any intention in truly converting.

Now you’re spending money to support traffic (that you’ve already paid for), that doesn’t technically exist 👎

And things get worse the harder you look:

• Your CAC (or customer acquisition costs) is off, because it includes fake conversions
• Your CLTV (customer lifetime value) gets distorted, as the cohort never sticks around
• Your activation rate drops, because bots really don’t care about your lifecycle emails 
• Your email delivery service health suffers, because hard bounces are low engagement pile up
• Your product roadmap decisions falter, because you can’t build on faulty data

Another consideration? These “users” often end up costing more than the legit ones. You’re paying for the ad clicks, onboarding journeys, server resources, support tickets, email lifecycle sends…everything 💰

And in return you get…nothing.

Who’s hit hardest by fake user abuse?

Fake signups don’t discriminate, if you’ve got something that someone can get without paying for, they’re going to try.

Some industries get hit harder than others:

• SaaS platforms that offer freemium plans are prime targets. Fake users take advantage of multiple trials, clog up your user base, and never convert.
• eCommerce brands with gated member discounts or referral rewards can often see surges in duplicate accounts, ultimately gaming the system.
• Marketplaces often face bot-generated accounts, created en masse, trying to spam listings, leave fake reviews, and even test stolen payment methods. 
• Subscription based services get farmed by people cycling through signups using fake alias emails and prepaid cards.

Even if you’re not offering anything for “free”, bad signups can still hurt. 

They take up space, create noise, and destroy your targeting 🎯

The anatomy of a fake account

Fake accounts don’t show up with flashing warning signs.

They often look like real users, until you start pulling on the thread - that’s when the patterns start to show 🧵

At first glance, it’s just another “new user”. But under the hood, it’s the same person (or a bot) abusing your signup form over and over again, just dressed in different disguises 🤖

Let’s break it down:

The burner email address problem: They never use their real inbox, why would they? Instead, bad actors opt for throwaways like "superdeal@yopmail.com" or "getfree@tempmail.net", all spun up in seconds ✉️

Or worse, they get creative with Gmail aliases like "olivia@gmail.com", "olivia+1@gmail.com", "olivia+newtrial@gmail.com". You see three different uses, but in reality it's just one very determined freebie hunter.‍

The subtle identity remix: Same first name, slight tweak to the last. Maybe they change their postcode or misspell the address on purpose. Far too often it fools your system into thinking they’re someone new, especially if your services don’t require an address to be validated 👥‍

The rapid-fire form fills: Bots, don’t, sleep. With a little script, they can fire thousands of registrations in a single day. They don’t need to think, they don’t make typos, and often they don’t even move a mouse. If you’re not checking scroll depth, interaction, and engagement, you’re opening yourself up to a data tsunami 🌊‍

The rinse and repeat: Your system has been fooled, next comes the reward - a free trial, discount, credits, or maybe even a referral bonus. Next? They’re off to spin up the next account 💵

This isn’t just simple gaming of the system, it is the system for these abusers ⚠️

Without the right defences, you’re calling them leads when they’re just leeching from your CAC and warping your conversion data.

No defence, all offence.

Quick wins that plug the holes (fast)

If fake signups are getting out of hand, or even just trickling in quietly, here’s how to hit back with simple but powerful fixes:

1. Block the burners: You need to start with the obvious: block known disposable email domains like Yopmail, Mailinator, 10MiunuteMail etc. There are tons of open-source lists and services that’ll verify an email domain in real-time. This one tweak alone can cut out a big chunk of junk, fast ⛔
2. Rate limit your signup forms: It might be a basic move, but it works. Add request throttling to your signup endpoint and limit IPs to a few submissions per hour (or whatever is logical for your business use case), combine this with a smart CAPTCHA, then watch bot based signups fall off a cliff ✋
3. Validate email addresses better: Sure, it's in the right format and looks genuine, but is it a real inbox, or is it a part of a suspicious domain? Deploy validation APIs that go deeper than basic format checking 🔍
4. Add some basic friction to signup flows: It goes against the phrase ‘frictionless onboarding’, but hear us out. Delaying access to the “goodies” until certain verification steps are passed can deter bots and repeat offenders. It’s one of the cheapest possible ways to cut out automated abuse 🚧
5. Check for behavioural patterns: When you know what to look for, it’s fairly easy to spot the tell-tale signs of fake accounts:
   ‍
   
   1. Same device or IP address
   2. Same browser and OS (operating system) combo
   3. Same “flow” - we’re talking landing, signup, grabbing the code, then bouncing. This is where typical analytics tools drop the ball

Tools like Hitprobe can spot fake signs up and abuse instantly with session-level tracking, and IP analysis. But device fingerprinting?

That’s your real secret weapon 🤫

The game changer

Instead of relying on surface-level data, device fingerprinting builds a unique identity based on things like browser setup, OS version, installed fonts, plugins etc…basically imagine it as the digital DNA of your visitor’s device.

If someone signs up using 15 different email addresses from the same laptop, you’ll know.

If they switch to incognito mode or reset their cookies, fingerprinting still catches and matches 🍪

And unlike cookies, it’s much harder to spoof, meaning bots and those serial abusers can’t just wipe their browser and start again - it leaves a trace, and you can track it.

With tools like Hitprobe, every click, form submission, and suspicious pattern is tied back to a unique device fingerprint. Which means:

• One device creating 10 fake accounts? Flagged
• The same user trying to continuously reuse and abuse a free trial? Blocked
• A suspicious browser scraping your site every hour? Spotted

💡 Bonus tip: Watch the patterns, not just the users.

Fake accounts don’t always show up in huge bursts.

Sometimes it’s just a slow drip, one signup at a time for days or weeks.

That’s why you need behavioural engagement analysis and session context. Things like:

• Unusual signup times or somewhat near perfect intervals
• Repeated button click flows
• Same location and new emails used

When you stop and zoom out from the individual and focus on patterns, abuse becomes much easier to detect (and stop) 👀

The cost of doing nothing

Ok so depending on the size of your business, it might not seem like a big deal at first.

So what if 5% of your signups are junk? You can just delete them later, right?

But here’s what that 5% actually costs over time:

1. You pay for ad clicks that never convert
2. You send onboarding emails to ghosted inboxes
3. You create support overhead for fake users
4. You make decisions based on data that isn’t real
5. You slow down your real users with validation queues and spam checks, solely based on the fact you already know your traffic isn’t as clean as you thought
6. You inflate your CRM and hit pricing thresholds early

Let’s put this into some straightforward (worst case) napkin math 🧮

A new product gains 10,000 new signsups per month.

If 7.5% of these are fake, that’s 750 junk users.

If each one of these costs you $2 in infrastructure, emails, support and acquisition, that’s $1500/per month down the drain.

Over a year that’s $18,000 of pure waste 🗑️

Why Hitprobe works where others don’t

Hitprobe wasn’t built for surface metrics. 

It’s built for marketers and growth teams that really care about accuracy 🎯

That’s not to say that other tools in the market don’t offer accuracy, but there’s trade offs.

Take GA4 (Google Analytics), it's the one-stop-shop for everything, but when you don’t need to see everything all at once, it becomes noisy and distracting. On top of that, their algorithms include some AI guesswork to plug gaps in data and it’s simply not designed for tackling fraud - Google’s main revenue stream…ad revenue 💸

Then you’ve got other players like Mixpanel or Plausible - great products, offering simple or more complex approaches, but if you need to take action on data, you’re going to need a different product as device fingerprinting or IP analysis isn’t part of their products.

When you use Hitprobe, you’re not just counting conversions and bounce rates, you’re qualifying them. You’ll know when:

• The same device signs up 3 times in a row
• An IP address cycles through 15 different email addresses
• A signup came from a botnet or suspicious domain
• A user looks real but behaves like a ghost

You can stop wasting budget on fake users and start tracking actual performance, and you can do it in less than 15 minutes ⏲️

No fraud team required, no lengthy setup.

Just clean, actionable data 👌

Our final word: Don’t let fake growth bury the real users

Not every new signup is a win.

Some are noise, others are abuse, and some are just bots burning through your budget.

If your user base is padded with duplicates, fakes, and freeloaders, you're not just skewing your numbers, you're scaling on some questionable foundations.

The best marketers know that real growth starts with clean data, genuine users, and a protected funnel 🛡️

Hitprobe cuts through the clutter, helping you track real people, block fake accounts, and finally see who’s actually in your funnel, and who’s just gaming the system.

Because when your signups are real, your decisions are better.

And when your growth is protected, it’s sustainable.

Let the real users in. Keep the fakes out.

Start securing your signup flow with Hitprobe 🚀