HowBots Creating Customer Records with Signup for Newsletter

[shopsuperbeachy]

I've seen past posts but don't see any resolutions for when bots create customer records and send out emails that the customer has signed up for the Newsletter.  The only way I found this was happening was the bot every so often would enter a valid email address and that person who never has been to my site, received an email saying thank you for signing up for the Newsletter.   Any help or guidance is appreciated.

 

[Blackpent · Accepted solution]

Have you checked that you have enabled the anti-span protection in your store?  --> Preferences.

And maybe the theme has to support this too...

[shopsuperbeachy]

Thank you for replying.  I did several things which seem to work in combination. I disabled all ability to create an account/login on my store.  No one ever used this feature in the 3 years the store has been open so removing it was not an issue. Then I turned on Captcha/ReCaptcha and that seems to have stopped the bots who were creating customer records.  I did try a 3rd party app, which while the support folks were very very helpful - their solution did not stop the bots.  I tried several iterations of settings in the product (while turning captcha off for the test) and anytime captcha was off - fake bot records were being created.  What was truly the frustrating part, as me removing the fake records was easy - was that my store was setup to send out Welcome and thank  you for creating an account emails which is how I found out about the fake records.  People were emailing me that they never signed up as a customer of mine. 

[Blackpent]

You are welcome!

I hope you have no more problems with bots and that your email does not get marked as spam.

Good luck!