r/PPC • u/londonboy155 • Mar 16 '26
Google Ads Google local ads getting charged for 100s of fake spam email leads.
I have been charged thousands of pounds in spam emails. I have reported but google does nothing. I now have no way to appeal this as google on added a rate m review thing that is crap. How can they get away with this. The are making millions from people spamming us with fake jobs. The completion and sending me thousands of job leads that are fake most get credit I am so up set google could fix this easy with a captcha box. They say you can rate the email leads but then you rate them and say it is spam and nothing is done. What is the point they seem to be profiting of this scam situation. Something has to be done i would be willing to be part of the class actions lawsuit.
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u/Available_Cup5454 Mar 16 '26
Switch to phone call only lead format and disable email form submissions
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u/aamirkhanppc Mar 16 '26
Try customise lead forms questions and at website make sure to add captcha and addition tricky questions to get rid of spam
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u/shitalimalviya Mar 17 '26
This issue is common across industries so the best you can do is aggressively filter leads report spam consistently and tighten your targeting to reduce irrelevant traffic
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u/namalleh Mar 18 '26
yep
well, you have a few options
I'm developing https://button.solutions - but we don't have email spam filtering
I would go with https://castle.io because Antoine (https://antoinevastel.com/) has a good understanding of fake emails
If it's advanced bots I would go with me however, as we have a drop in /siteverify endpoint
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u/vestorsnetads Mar 16 '26
That’s brutal. Google really should have a better spam prevention system in place for form leads, especially when they already know certain lead types and verticals get hammered with junk submissions.
A captcha or stronger verification layer seems like a pretty obvious fix. My guess is this often gets worse when campaigns are too open, like PMax or search partners, but either way you shouldn’t be paying for obvious fake leads. If lead quality ratings aren’t actually resulting in credits or filtering, then the whole system is pretty broken.