Of course, form spam by humans is as old as the Web itself.
Some of these bot vendors even offer customer support or add-on features to provide specific capabilities for their users to leverage There exists a whole ecosystem of sites that sell bot programs that can execute a activities ranging from the unethical ( scraping and spamming) to outright criminal (such as account takeover, carding and ad fraud). Programming bots to search for web forms to abuse is quite trivial compared to some of the more malicious activities that fraudsters and cybercriminals program bots to carry out. Spam links are also posted by bots to generate traffic to shady sites that generate ad revenue through them. When a person clicks on these spam links, they may be susceptible to malware downloads or loss of confidential information. Form fills are generally sent to group email IDs at marketing or sales departments, hence form spam ends up being a waste of time and effort for those teams.
When a form is filled on a website, it is often considered a ‘lead’ from an interested customer or sales prospect. Most form spam is created by bots which are programmed to find web forms and fill them out. Form spam is the filling out and submission of web forms with irrelevant or fake information, including abusive language, ads, spam links to malware-laden sides and phishing websites set up by scammers.
