Rep Data Grounds Survey 'Bad Actors'

In New Orleans, research data and fraud prevention solutions provider Rep Data has announced the launch of a 'No-Fly' list, which it says will exclude 'all known bad actors' from entering or re-entering any survey run through its Research Defender solution.

Rep Data was founded in 2019 by former Lucid and Research Now exec Patrick Stokes (pictured_, and offers full service data collection solutions for primary quant studies. Just under two years ago it acquired data quality and anti-fraud software platform Research Defender (previously SampleChain), whose software matches respondents to relevant surveys and prevents sample fraud / duplication; and it also offers Research Desk, a centralized DIY sampling platform that enhances efficiency and data quality.

The No Fly list makes use of the three billion survey scans Rep Data has made in the last twelve months across nearly 200 sample sources, with approximately fifteen million more scans coming in each day.

'Even if a respondent is taking your survey through a first-party source, you might not know that it's the 267th survey of their day,' says CTO Vignesh Krishnan, 'because it's a bad actor equipped to game the system to reap incentives at high volumes. You also might not know that they've already answered that same survey in three other sources that happen to share samples behind the scenes due to supply shifts. The industry is messy, and the No-Fly list addition to Rep Data's Research Defender fraud prevention suite helps researchers clean it all up for their projects, permanently.'

A test survey by the firm's Head of Research Steven Snell, PhD, used some 1,928 respondents from a variety of prevalent sample sources, allowing low-quality respondents without the usual Research Defender blocks. Rep Data says 31% of responses were fraudulent, with the great majority of these (26% of completions) classified as 'good-looking fraud' - which the firm says means there would have been no way to detect the poor quality through either human-supervised or AI-focused data cleaning.

'Just a few weeks ago,' says Stokes, 'our team spotted a rise in a new fraud trend accounting for about 0.3% of traffic across the entire survey ecosystem, mixing and matching IP addresses and device identifiers to be able to batch enter the same survey, and we mitigated the risk immediately. No one else is doing this. Now, we're taking it a step further by blacklisting bad actors permanently with our No-Fly list.'

The firm, which three months ago said it had received an unspecified amount of growth investment from Colorado-based private equity firm Mountaingate Capital, is online at www.repdata.com .