Fake Signups

Some miscreant fills out your signup form with "asdf jkl;" and a guerrillamail address. Another one uses a random name generator and a throwaway inbox. Your database fills up with garbage accounts that will never convert, never engage, and never come back. Some are bots, others are real humans just smashing the keyboard. Either way, they're wrecking your data and filling your database with garbage.

The Junk Signup Problem

Every product with a signup form attracts the riffraff. Some of it's automated, like bots creating accounts to spam, scrape, or stockpile credentials for later abuse. But a surprising amount comes from real people: tire-kickers who mash the keyboard to get past your form, uncommitted users who don't trust you with real data, and people who just want to peek behind the login wall without any commitment.

Either way, the result is the same. Your user table fills up with accounts that have no real identity behind them. Names like "test test" and "aaa bbb". Email addresses from disposable providers that will bounce within the hour. Profanities. Data that passes form validation but is completely meaningless.

The usual defenses don't solve this.

Fake signups are hard to prevent at the door because they come in many forms. They're usually a sign of bad behavior to come. To deal with the problem, you need a system that evaluates the quality and authenticity of each signup, not just its format.

Fake Signups Have Real Costs

Junk accounts aren't just clutter — they actively degrade your operations, your outreach, and your ability to understand what's actually happening in your product.

How Dregs Detects Fake Signups

Dregs scores every signup across multiple dimensions simultaneously. A junk account might slip past one signal, but failing across several at once is a clear indicator that something isn't right.

Authenticity Score

The Authenticity score catches disposable email domains, names that don't follow natural patterns ("asdf", repetitive or random character strings), and identity data that doesn't hold together. When someone signs up with a disposable email address and a keyboard-mashed name, Authenticity drops to the floor immediately.

Humanity Score

Not all fake signups are the same. Bot-generated accounts have distinctive device fingerprints — headless browsers, impossible hardware profiles, missing browser APIs. The Humanity score separates automated garbage from human garbage, which matters because you might want to respond to them differently.

Behavior Score

Junk signups tend to follow a pattern: arrive and fill out the form quickly. No browsing, no reading, no exploration. The Behavior score detects unnaturally fast activity, sessions with no navigation beyond the signup page, and atypical patterns of interaction.

Uniqueness Score

Serial junk signups, whether bots or humans, often use the same device to create one account after another. The Uniqueness score catches this by recognizing shared device fingerprints across accounts. Duplicates accounts with the same device get flagged.

Example: Catching a Junk Signup

Here's what it looks like in practice:

No manual review needed... the junk signup is caught and handled within seconds of submission.

Quarantining Fake Signups

Detection is only half the story. How you handle junk signups depends on your product and your tolerance for false positives. Dregs gives you the scoring data to automate whichever approach fits.

With Dregs webhooks, any of these responses can be fully automated. Your application receives scores and badges in real time and acts on them without human intervention — whether it's the middle of the night, a weekend, or a product launch day.