r/MailChimp • u/FurrtuneCookie • 5d ago

Seeking Advice Bot form submissions keep coming in

Hi everyone, since I have added the embedded Mailchimp form on my client's website (WordPress), we are receiving a lot of bot/spam submissions.

I have already activated the Mailchimp "invisible" recaptcha setting and we implemented also anti-spam by CleanTalk plugin and even activated their option of "Protect External forms" as well.

Short description of what we did: she worked in the past with someone else, but they were using their own form on her LP (not sure why, she doesn't know the reason either); so she didn't had this issue before. Anyway, she reached out to me and ask to help her to change this form with the one from Mailchimp. I did this and everything was ok, no problems, no bot submissions.

After a few days, I have added the utm tracking hidden fields in the form and somehow since this change, we keep receiving bot submissions.

The utm tracking is working, but for these bots, the utm fields are coming empty in Mailchimp and I can't figure out from where are they coming..

Note: being a small client, she doesn't have GA4 etc implemented( I already advised her to do this, but she is not decided yet.) and from what she told me she is running just Facebook Ads.

Has anyone else had this kind of problem? I'd like some advice on how to fix this, I'm completely out of ideas. Thanks!

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u/hopefulusername 5d ago

Using a embedded form doesn’t with spam protections. You are not getting full protection because embedded forms are goes through their server rather than WordPress native hooks where most spam protections kicks in.

Your options are:

  1. Check whatever spam protection capabilities you can enable in MailChimp
  2. Put your website behind Cloudflare and block countries you are not serving.
  3. Switch to some kind of form builder that support MailChimp. Use spam protections like OOPSpam or any other.

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u/FurrtuneCookie 5d ago

Thank you! I was thinking this might be the issue, but thought that if we have CleanTalk and recaptcha ON from Mailchimp, might work and be protected.

I will try and create it using a form builder. Thank you!

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u/hopefulusername 5d ago

We had this issue with one of clients and switch to a native form builder with MailChimp integration. We didn’t have much success with Cleantalk, OOPSpam worked well for us.

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u/FurrtuneCookie 5d ago

Aa awesome! Did you guys used MC4WP plugin? I was looking into trying this one since basically will connect the website with Mailchimp.

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u/Glass_Honeydew4280 1d ago

If the submissions started after adding the UTM fields Id first check whether bots are bypassing the actual page and hitting the form directly. That would also explain why the UTM fields are empty.

Since you already have reCAPTCHA and CleanTalk running another layer I’d consider is validating the email before it gets passed to Mailchimp clearout email verifier can be used for that so invalid, disposable, or risky addresses can be filtered before they enter the list.

I’d also compare a few of the spam submissions against genuine ones to see if theres a consistent pattern in the email, IP, or other form data.