How to Stop Spam Registrations in Magento 2?

How to Stop Spam Registrations in Magento 2

Are you looking to stop spam registrations in Magento 2?

Magento 2 is a popular ecommerce platform. There are thousands of ecommerce stores on Magento, making it a lucrative target for hackers. All the credit card information and customers’ data are worth hacking.

Spam registration is one way to enter the store. It is your responsibility to secure the signup process and customer data.

In this article, we will learn to stop spam registrations in Magento 2 and block spam bots.

What are Spam Registrations?

Spam registrations in the Magento store are not registered accounts from real people. The accounts are created through bots and crawlers running around the web. The spammers and hackers use the automated scripts to create fake accounts in bulk.

Why Customer Registration Spam?

There are parts of the website that are only visible to the registered users. Once the user is registered, their database is stored in a different list – with the already registered users and customers.

When you are browsing the website without registering, you are glancing at the website from the outside. A Magento store does not store your information besides caching and cookies.

Once the account is created, the cache, cookies, and marketing tags get an identity. The registered account is a part of the Magento store, and they interact with the store on different layers.

The hackers use the registrations to inject the hijacking scripts to steal the information and hack stores. Doing spam registration is easy if you know the basics of hacking, and that’s why we see tremendous amounts of spam registration across the web.

Not only spam account registration, but hackers also use newsletter subscriptions and contact forms to inject files into the website’s database.

Disadvantages of Spam Registrations?

The disadvantages of spam registrations:

Security Issue: The biggest disadvantage of fake accounts is that they are a threat to Magento security. By creating an account, they have a way into your store. From there, they try to exploit outdated themes and extensions.

Database Cluttering: The spam registrations clutter the database with useless information. The tables are filled with fake accounts and eat space. It affects the database speed and messes up the store performance. 

Marketing Campaigns: You see an increase in user registration after a campaign and think the campaign is a success. But the sales are not increasing – because of the fake registrations. The spam registrations messed up the a/b testing and another marketing metric. You cannot take correct data-driven results when the data itself is corrupted.

Spam registration affects the speed, security, and sales of your store. These negative impacts of customer registration spam are enough to take measures against it.

How to Stop Spam Registrations in Magento 2?

You can stop spam registrations by:

  1. Adding OTP verifications
  2. Adding CAPTCHA in Magento 2
  3. Adding Social Media verification
  4. Using extensions for custom functions

#1 Adding OTP verifications

OTP verification is the most popular method used by ecommerce stores to verify the users. The email verifications have become diluted as many scammers have started using proxy servers to create bulk emails. 

But mobile OTP is still an efficient method to prevent spamming.

The users registering the account have to add their numbers to the registration form. They will get an OTP to their phone number, which will ensure that a user is a real person.

OTP verification is done by adding OTP Verification Extension for Magento. The extensions easily integrate the mobile OTP module and SMS service to streamline the number verification.

#2 Adding CAPTCHA in Magento 2

CAPTCHA stands for the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

Google ReCaptcha Example

It’s a small tool to differentiate between real human users and automated users such as bots, scripts, and crawlers. CAPTCHA provides challenges that can be solved easily by humans, but they are effective against the bots.

For example: identifying stretched letters and numbers or clicking on a specific image or specific area.

You can add the Captcha in the Magento 2 store.

  1. Open the admin panel of your Magento 2 store
  2. Navigate to Stores > Configuration
  3. Open Customers under Customer Configuration
  4. Expand the CAPTCHA section and open the Forms
  5. Enable the feature on the store sections you wan

#3 Adding Social Media verification

Social Media Login Extension

Another user verification method is to use social media verification. The bots and scammers do not put that much effort into creating fake accounts. Creating social media accounts means verifying the social media account using OTP and various other channels. 

So, basically, you are only allowing the accounts verified by the respective social media platform.

Read: Best Social Media Login Extension for Magento 2

Social media registration also cut down the steps to filling out the registration form. With one click, it fetched the information from Facebook/Google and filled in the user information. You can run better ad targeting if you have customers’ social media accounts.

Also, customers can quickly create an account and make a purchase without verifying their emails, doing OTP verification, and filling the Captcha. Social media registration is a popular way to prevent spam registration. 

#4 Using extensions for Custom Functions

Stop Spam Registrations in Magento 2

For extra functions, you can install a Magento extension. Several Magento extensions to control spam registration are:

  1. Magento 2 Restrict Fake Registration by Meetanshi
  2. Spam And Bot Blocker For Magento 2 by MageAnts
  3. Magento 2 Spam and Bot Blocker by Firebearstudio
  4. Magento 2 Restrict Fake Registration Extension by SetuBridge

The extensions help you in:

  • Blacklist the specific IP’s from the backend.
  • Add your custom restriction message if needed.
  • Built-in integration of Google ReCAPTCHA for zero spamming
  • Bots create random names. Restrict the words and limit the character limit in the first and last name.
  • Whitelisting and blacklisting of email domains (you can blacklist the certain email domains such as .ru to prevent the spam)

And much more.

Wrap Up

The spammers and bots are an integral part of the internet, and they are not going anywhere. It is up to you to prevent spam registration on your Magento store.

In this quick article, we learned the disadvantages and methods to stop spam registrations in Magento 2.

Please comment down and let us know if you find any other solution. If you encounter any issue while implementing any methods, leave it in the comment section.

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