Welcome to our website on bot prevention for researchers!

We are a group of researchers in the Department of Psychological Science at Ball State University. In 2025, we experienced firsthand a bot attack when collecting data online. We posted our recruitment materials on a few Facebook groups in the evening and woke up to over 3000 responses – all expecting a $20 gift card. Needless to say, we panicked, shut down the survey, contacted our IRB, and started brainstorming ways we were going to tell participants that we didn’t have the money to pay them all. However, after a quick examination of the data, it became clear that most of our data were fraudulent.  

The incident led to two months of work, including constant communication with our IRB (who were our lifelines during all of this), developing ways to determine “real” participants so they could receive their compensation, handling harassing emails (and even phone calls to the IRB) from scammers about their compensation, researching best practices to prevent bot attacks, re-designing our surveys, and revisiting recruitment strategies to prevent future attacks.  

The event set us back in our research timeline and took a huge toll on us emotionally. However, we realized (thanks to Eli) that this frustrating and disheartening experience could be used as a catalyst for conversation and sharing of resources among researchers. It was clear this is a topic of concern for many researchers, that prevention and detection methods are changing rapidly, and that teaching related to bot attacks is often missing and/or glossed over in our Research Methods classes. Thus, we saw a need for a consolidated site to provide resources for researchers. So here it is! 

We envision this space as a way for researchers to share resources related to bot/scammer prevention, detection, and responses. If you have any questions or would like to propose additions to the website, please contact Dr. Katie Lawson at kmlawson4@bsu.edu. 

Last updated: September 29, 2025