Member Validation

At Fuel Cycle, we understand that research integrity is paramount to producing quality insights and results. The biggest threat to research integrity are bots and fraudulent users trying to manipulate the system to take a survey multiple times or gain money.

By default, Fuel Cycle mitigates the risk of fraudulent or suspicious community members from joining your community or taking surveys. Fuel Cycle uses proprietary tools to detect suspicious user activity. This functionality is always on. Contact your Fuel Cycle representative if you wish to opt out.

Validation Status

You can find the Member Validation section under the Members > Validation Data tab.

Fuel Cycle tags each community member with one of the following values:

• Valid: member has been verified with all the data points (email, phone, IP verified, etc.)
• Suspicious: member is verified; however, one of the data points is suspicious. For example, maybe the member is using an email address that they use exclusively for attracting spam or managing subscriptions.
• Invalid: email or phone is not verified.

Email and Domain As Primary Verification

Fuel Cycle protects your communities by filtering out fraudulent users, bots, and spam. We use email validations and a scoring service that checks against 30 data points. In particular, we validate against:

• High-Risk Email Addresses: tracks abusive emails and stolen identities online.
• Disposable Email Addresses: tracks against stale addresses and domains.
• High-Risk Email Creation Data Ages: fraudsters typically cycle through new domains very quickly, and this value detects new internet domains that are identified as hosting abusive email addresses.

Secondary Verification

Moderators can enable additional phone validation for members. Enable this feature by going to the Gamification section and clicking Require Phone Number for Redemption. Doing so will require that Suspicious users validate themselves by entering a valid phone number. There are three available screening options:

• None: There is no phone validation.
• Suspicious Users: only users who have been marked as “Suspicious” will be required to validate their phone numbers.
• All Users: All users will be required to validate their phone numbers.

The Gamification section includes a report of the total number of member validation statuses:

• Invalid—Member emails that are considered fraudulent.
• Suspicious—Member emails that seem suspicious.
• Valid—Member emails that have been validated.
• Pending Validations—Member emails that have not yet been evaluated.
• Manually Verified—Member emails where a moderator has manually verified the member. 

Manual Verification

If a member is flagged as a Suspicious or Invalid User, moderators may choose to verify a member themselves. For example, a B2B community member may use an internal email domain for their email address, and Fuel Cycle cannot validate that internal domain or a grandmother doesn't have a smartphone for secondary validation.

1. Go to the Members > Validation Data screen.
2. Search for the suspicious member's email address.
3. Click the Show Details link.
   
   
4. Click the green Verify button on the member details page to manually validate their contact information. Once confirmed, the button changes to grey and is labeled Validated.
   
   

If you want to manually verify many members at one time, use the Batch Update feature to import a list and change records at one time. This is reversible, in case a member starts to show signs of suspicious behavior. If you reverse the manual validation, the member will need to verify their mobile phone number.