How to Tell If a Lead Is Fake: The 90-Second Test

A fake lead is rarely a bot. Four of the five types that actually reach a contractor involve a real human being with a working phone number, a real address and a name that survives every validation tool you can buy. That is precisely why the standard advice, add a captcha and check for gibberish emails, keeps failing you: it is built to catch the one species you see least.

Almost everything written on this topic is aimed at software marketers whose problem is bot traffic hitting a demo form. Yours is different. You pay per lead, you dispatch a truck, and the expensive fakes look completely legitimate right up until you are standing in a driveway.

The 90-second test, cheapest check first

Before diagnosing anything, run these four in order. Each one costs less than the one after it, and most fakes fail before you reach the fourth.

1. Search the service address. Put it into a real estate listing site and into your county or municipal property records. You are looking for two things: is the house currently for sale, and when was this exact system last replaced.
2. Ask which listing they came through. A genuine caller can tell you they found you on Google, on a neighbour's recommendation, or through the marketplace where they picked you off a list. A recycled or brokered lead usually cannot, because they never chose you.
3. Offer a specific in person slot. Not a quote, a time. Real customers negotiate the time. Fakes deflect, go quiet, or explain why a visit is unnecessary.
4. Ask how they plan to pay. You are not screening for creditworthiness. You are listening for whether they volunteer a cashier's check before you have given them a number.

That is the whole triage. The rest of this article is what each failure mode means and why the check works.

Species 1: the zombie, a real lead with expired intent

The zombie is a genuine past inquiry resold as new. Everything about it validates, because everything about it was true once.

The term is the contractors' own. In an r/Contractor thread that drew 99 comments, an operator who had just been pitched a "high demand" lead package documented what other pros reported back: a homeowner who got a call about a roof job that had been finished two years earlier, from a contractor who had just paid for that name as a fresh lead, and a separate pro who paid 150 dollars for a lead from someone who had never requested a quote at all.

That is not folklore, and the structural reason for it is in the platform's own filings. Angi Inc.'s Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 31 March 2025 states that the company implemented homeowner choice on nearly all experiences "such that those consumers are connected only with available Pros that they select, discontinuing the majority of experiences where homeowners are automatically matched with available Pros."

Read that again as a contractor. Until early 2025, the majority of those experiences matched homeowners to you automatically. The homeowner did not pick you, and often did not know you were coming.

The same filing shows what happened to volume when the auto matching stopped:

A 57 percent collapse in network leads is a reasonable proxy for the size of the pool that was never homeowner initiated. If you bought leads through those channels before 2025 and felt that half of them had no idea who you were, the arithmetic supports you.

The check that catches it: question two. Ask which listing or ad they contacted you through. A homeowner who chose you can answer. A homeowner whose details were matched or resold cannot, and often responds by asking who you are.

Species 2: the manufactured lead, created by a text blast

This one is worse than useless, because it can cost you a review.

The supply chain works like this. A marketing operation sends mass texts on a generic script: "Hi, it's Meg with [company name]. We've been removing mold near [your street address]. Would you like a quote?" Anyone who replies with even mild interest becomes a "lead" sold to a local contractor. The homeowner never went looking for a service. They responded to an interruption.

A thread on r/AITAH with more than 560 upvotes lays out the consequence from the other side. The homeowner, receiving three to five of these a week, started writing one star Google reviews for the companies contacting them. The top comment, at 400 upvotes, describes doing the same thing to door knockers: answer, ask for the company name, leave the review. Another suggests leaving two stars instead of one because they are harder to get removed.

You paid for that name. You made the call. You absorbed the review. The operation that farmed the number is invisible.

The check that catches it: question two again, plus the tone of the first thirty seconds. If the person sounds confused about why you are calling, you are the second contact in a chain that started with a text they did not want.

Species 3: the data harvester on a listed house

This is the one nobody writes about, and it is the reason check number one exists.

An r/Contractor operator described being texted about re siding a house, exchanging messages about material and timeline, then arriving to find the property listed for sale. The "homeowner" claimed to be in escrow. The contractor knew the listing agent and confirmed that was false. When offered an in person meeting, the caller hung up. It was the second time in eighteen months.

Another contractor in the same thread described the identical pattern for roofing and added the tell that turns it into a rule: "When I pull the information on the county site, the roof had usually been replaced within 5 years. When I question them about it they just say they want new shingles."

Two motives are plausible and it does not much matter which applies. Either someone is harvesting local pricing, or a buyer is collecting repair quotes to negotiate the seller down. Both use your unpaid estimating hour as free market research.

The check that catches it: question one. A live listing plus a recently replaced system is a near certain fake. Both facts are public, free, and take under ninety seconds.

Species 4: the overpayment scam, the only one that takes cash

Every other fake lead costs you time. This one is trying to remove money from your bank account, and it arrives dressed as the best job of your month.

The script is remarkably consistent. Here is the shape of one posted verbatim to r/Contractor, lightly condensed:

"I'm relocating with my family from Maryland to Germantown, WI. I just got the house and I would like it ready before my arrival. The house has 3 Bedrooms, 1,944 square feet. Living Room Dimensions: 18 x 20. Master Bedroom: 16 x 20 ... You can visit the house if you want to, but I don't think it's necessary because I am not in Germantown at the moment. The person in charge of the flooring delivery is the one who will give you access. I have already placed an Order for the flooring you are to install ... Give me your Estimate so I can Proceed with the payment, and I would like to know if you accept a Cashier's check as a means of payment."

Count the tells, because they are all in there:

• Unsolicited inbound, usually a text from an unfamiliar area code.
• A relocation story that explains why they cannot meet.
• Complete dimensions supplied upfront, which exists solely to remove your reason for a site visit.
• Materials already ordered, so there is nothing for you to specify.
• A third party with access, so no principal ever appears.
• Payment method raised before price, and specifically a cashier's check.
• Deposit offered generously, often 50 percent, to make refusing feel foolish.

Then the check arrives for more than you quoted. A contractor in that thread described receiving 12,000 dollars with instructions to forward 2,000 to the "painter" so the buyer would not have to write two cheques. The mechanism is a timing exploit: your bank makes funds available before the instrument actually clears, you wire the 2,000, the cashier's check is dishonoured days later, and you are out the 2,000 plus fees. He took it to his bank, which kept it as evidence and filed a report.

The FTC ranks fake check scams as carrying a median individual loss near 2,000 dollars, higher than any other scam in its top ten. That figure lines up uncomfortably well with the amount contractors are asked to forward.

Species 5: the bot, the only one the internet writes about

Genuine automated form fills are real, and they are the easiest to stop, which is why every article on this topic is about them. The Imperva 2025 Bad Bot Report found automated traffic crossed a threshold in 2024, reaching 51 percent of all web traffic, with bad bots alone at 37 percent.

The detection signals are well established and worth implementing once: a four field form completed in under three seconds, a hidden honeypot field that came back filled in, disposable email domains, and submissions clustered on one IP or from geographies you do not serve.

But note what contractors actually report. On r/Contractor, an operator who paused Google Ads and restarted them months later said the spam started immediately, from "city/towns not even in my area or state." Another confirmed the same after restarting a paused campaign, adding that none of the phone numbers connected. The top reply was not about the form at all: restrict the campaign's locations to specific ZIP codes.

That is the correct order of operations. Fix the traffic before you fix the form. Tighten geographic targeting, review your search terms, and turn off Search Partners. A captcha on a page fed by junk traffic just filters junk more politely.

The five species, side by side

Notice that the same two questions catch the first two, and a calendar invitation catches the third and fourth. You do not need software for four of five.

What fake leads cost beyond the lead fee

Three costs compound quietly.

The truck roll. At roughly 200 to 300 dollars per dispatch, three fake site visits a month is a technician's week over a year.

Your ad algorithm. This one silently gets worse. If a fake lead fires the same conversion event as a booked job, your bidding optimises toward whatever produces more fakes. Feed qualified stages back rather than raw form fills. If you cannot see which source produced each lead, you cannot stop paying for more of the bad ones.

Your reputation. The least reversible. A one star review from someone who never wanted a quote outlives the campaign that produced them.

The four fields that prevent most of it

You cannot filter your way out of a bad lead source, but a form that asks for the right four things sorts most fakes before a human reads them:

1. Service address, not just a city. It enables the property records check and it makes the geography mismatch obvious.
2. A service selection, not free text. Bots and brokered leads pick the first option in every dropdown. Real customers pick the one that describes their problem.
3. One specific context question. "What is happening right now?" cannot be autofilled and cannot be answered by someone who never had the problem.
4. A timing question. It separates a buyer from a price researcher without you having to ask on the phone.

Add a honeypot and a server side timing check behind the scenes, then stop adding fields. Every extra field costs you genuine leads, and genuine leads are worth more than the fakes cost. Our free lead capture check will show you what a real submission looks like on your site.

Once you have confirmed it is fake

Do these three things, in this order, the same day.

Log the reason code. Not "bad lead." Use a fixed list: invalid contact, out of area, wrong service, never requested, suspected fraud. Vague feedback cannot be analysed and cannot be disputed.

File the dispute inside the platform's window, immediately. The windows are shorter than most owners assume and vary wildly by platform, and batching them at month end is what gets them denied. The rules and deadlines are covered in detail in our guide on how to dispute a bad lead credit.

Report the fraud, if it was fraud. An overpayment attempt belongs with your bank and the FTC. It costs nothing, and it is the paper trail that made the FTC's HomeAdvisor case possible: the March 2022 complaint alleged false or misleading claims about the quality and source of the leads sold to service providers, and the resulting order required payments of up to 7.2 million dollars, with the FTC returning more than 3 million dollars to 110,372 businesses.

The pre-dispatch checklist

Before any truck moves on a lead you did not personally book:

• Address searched against live listings and county or municipal property records
• System age checked, if the request is a replacement
• They can name where they found you
• A specific in person time was offered and accepted
• Payment method was raised by you, not volunteered by them
• Phone number connects to the person named, on a call you placed
• The request matches a service you actually sell, in a postal code you actually serve

Seven checks, under five minutes, against a 200 to 300 dollar dispatch.

The part detection cannot fix

Every check in this article is defensive. They stop you losing money on a lead you should never have received. They do nothing about why you keep receiving them.

The structure causes it. In a pay per lead model, the seller is paid on delivery, not on outcome. Volume is their revenue and your cost. Angi's own numbers show what happens when a marketplace finally makes homeowners choose their pro: network channel leads fell 57 percent, because more than half of what was flowing was never chosen by anyone. That was the product working as designed, and for years you were buying it.

The permanent fix is owning the demand rather than renting it: your own page, your own form, your own tracking, and leads that arrive because a homeowner deliberately chose to contact you. Then "is this fake" stops being a weekly question, because you know where every one came from. Speed still matters once they arrive, and responding within five minutes is worth more when the leads are real.