Eliminating Fake Leads and Bad Data with CarrierLookup

Summary

Fake leads and bad data drain budgets, waste sales and marketing effort, and increase compliance risk. CarrierLookup.com offers a practical, affordable solution by verifying phone numbers in real time, checking carrier and line-type information, and integrating directly with CRMs or forms. When you filter out invalid, disconnected, or suspicious numbers, your team can focus on genuine leads, improve campaign ROI, and reduce acquisition costs.

Fake leads aren’t just annoying—they’re expensive. Businesses lose around $84 billion each year on ad spend wasted on invalid contacts, poor quality data, and campaigns that never reach real prospects. 

Remember that with every fake number in your database, you lower your conversion rates and slow your team down. Success starts with authentic, trustworthy leads.

CarrierLookup.com helps by catching fake numbers at the source and flagging disposable or invalid contacts before they ever reach your CRM. That means your outreach goes to people who can respond, and your marketing dollars go further.

This guide walks you through the steps to eliminate fake leads and bad data, and how the right tool keeps your team focused on leads that count. 

The Hidden Cost of Fake Leads and Bad Data

Low-quality leads are costly liabilities that can silently drain your marketing and sales budgets. 

Here are the costs that often fly under the radar:

• Direct marketing costs: Every unqualified lead, whether a bot, disposable number, or invalid contact, burns your marketing budget. Wasted SMS, calls, and emails can quickly add up. Beyond the immediate spend, targeting fake leads also skews your campaign data, making it harder to identify which channels, messages, or campaigns are driving results. 
• Sales inefficiency: Sales teams spend hours chasing fake leads that will never convert, which increases Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC). The team’s time and effort go to dead ends instead of prospects who can become Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) or Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), which are important for hitting revenue targets and keeping campaigns on track.
• Compliance risks: Violating SMS compliance rules, such as those under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for local businesses handling EU/UK residents, and state laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act Regulations (CCPA), can result in steep fines and legal trouble. 

Some major compliance issues to be aware of when handling leads:

• TCPA: Sending SMS messages or making calls to numbers without prior consent. Fines range from $500–$1,500 per unsolicited call or text, with higher penalties if violations are willful.
• GDPR: Collecting or processing personal data from EU/UK residents without proper consent. Fines up to €20 million (around $23.2 million) or 4% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher.
• CCPA: Using personal data without proper disclosure or opt-out options for California residents. Penalties can reach over $7,900 per violation.

So imagine that you’re running a $100,000 campaign and you found out too late that 25% of the leads are fake. That immediately wasted $25,000 on trying to reach fake contacts. And because your sales team spent hours chasing dead ends, this drove up CAC and lowered your overall conversion rate. 

And to make matters worse, you’re also at risk of compliance violations, since contacting unverified numbers can count as using personal data without consent.

The result is a triple hit: wasted budget, lower sales efficiency, and potential legal penalties.

Why Traditional Validation Fails

Traditional validation methods try to catch inadequate data before it enters your CRM, but they often overlook deeper issues. They work in limited cases, like checking if a phone number is formatted correctly or spotting obvious duplicates. 

Here’s why traditional validation methods fall short:

• Syntax-only checks (Regex, format): These tools look at whether a phone number or email follows the correct pattern, like country code or parentheses. Regex (short for “regular expressions”) is a way to define these patterns and automatically check if the input matches. While this catches obvious mistakes, a number can be perfectly formatted yet still be fake, disposable, or VoIP, so syntax checks alone can’t verify authenticity.
• Manual lead reviews: Humans are great at identifying suspicious contacts by looking for patterns, unusual domains, or inconsistent information. That said, having to manually review thousands of entries is time-consuming, costly, and impractical for large campaigns.
• CRM deduplication: Tools for deduplication scan your database to remove repeated entries so that the same contact doesn’t appear multiple times. While this prevents wasted effort contacting the same person repeatedly, it doesn’t verify whether a number or email is real, active, or reachable. Fake leads can still slip through, which means that your CRM may be free of duplicates but still filled with contacts that won’t convert. It’s more used for organization.

In high-volume campaigns, relying on these methods leaves fake leads and invalid contacts slipping through. 

Step-by-Step Guide: How CarrierLookup Eliminates Fake Leads

You need modern solutions, such as a number validation API, that verifies contacts in real time and keeps your CRM full of genuine contacts. CarrierLookup.com does exactly that. 

Here’s how CarrierLookup works to eliminate fake leads:

1. Format validation: The first step is to conduct the most basic type of phone number check. Here, you confirm that a number follows the expected structure for a given country, including the correct number of digits, a valid country code, proper separators (like dashes or parentheses), and allowed prefixes. It’s a good first step to catch the obvious errors, like those with missing digits or extra characters. 
2. Carrier identification: After checking the format, the next step is to determine which telecom carrier owns the number and the type of line it uses. This is when you fetch the carrier information and type the line to CarrierLookup. It identifies numbers that may be fake or unsuitable for SMS campaigns.
3. Active status check: Then, use Home Location Register (HLR) lookups or carrier database queries to verify a number’s live status directly with telecom networks. These spots already disconnected numbers that are harder to detect.
4. VoIP/disposable detection: The next step is to identify numbers registered with VoIP or low-trust carriers, since these are most often tied to fake sign-ups or one-time use. This can be done through the line type data returned by tools like CarrierLookup or by pairing it with reputation databases that flag temporary or disposable numbers. 
5. Integration: Don’t forget to install the CarrierLookup API in your forms or CRM so you can run checks instantly. This lets you validate every number the moment it’s submitted, keeping bad data out of your database from the get-go. 

Keeping fake leads out of your system starts at the point of entry. With CarrierLookup and multi-step validation tools in place, every new contact is checked, verified, and ready for real engagement. 

Real Impact of Filtering Fake Leads

Cutting fake leads from your system improves how your sales and marketing teams work in more ways than you might think. 

Here’s the impact of thinking ahead and filtering out fake leads:

• Lower wasted ad spend: Fake contacts eat up your marketing budget through paid clicks, messages, and follow-ups that lead nowhere. Removing them ahead of time redirects that spend to verified contacts. 
• Increased sales efficiency: Removing fake leads frees your team to focus on real prospects. That translates to higher conversion rates and lower acquisition costs.
• Improved campaign ROI: Cleaner data improves your deliverability for SMS and email campaigns. This boosts your engagement rates and helps maintain sender reputation, which is how you’re rated by carriers and email providers for message quality and trust. Better delivery equals stronger ROI and more accurate performance metrics.

Let’s say your campaign brings in 10,000 leads, but 2,000 are fake. If each SMS costs $0.05, that’s $100 you’d waste sending messages that never reach anyone. With your lead validators in place, you save that amount for better results. 

Now factor in your sales team’s time. If each rep spends about five minutes trying to qualify each bad lead, that’s roughly 166 hours lost. Filtering those out means your team uses those hours chasing actual buyers.

ROI Equation

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Savings per Campaign = (Fake Leads × Cost per Lead) = (2,000 × $0.05) = $100

Hours Saved = (Fake Leads × Minutes per Lead) ÷ 60 = (2,000 × 5) ÷ 60 = 166.7 Hours

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Once your data is verified, you can reach your contacts quickly and at scale.

DialMyCalls is a go-to platform for sending voice broadcasts, SMS, and emails simultaneously, allowing you to contact your audience across multiple channels. 

This multi-channel approach increases the chances your messages are seen and acted on. Features like scheduling, voicemail drops, and text-to-speech make it easy to manage large campaigns without overwhelming your team. 

With reliable, verified data powering your outreach, every message reaches the people who actually matter.

How CarrierLookup.com Solves the Problem

Basic regex checks and manual reviews don’t cut it anymore. CarrierLookup.com fixes data quality gaps by verifying every number in real time, so only reachable contacts make it into your CRM.

Here’s how CarrierLookup.com tackles fake leads and bad data:

• Instant verification at sign-up: As soon as a user submits a phone number, CarrierLookup can run a lookup to fetch carrier and line-type data. This way, you catch bad entries right away. 
• Batch cleaning of existing CRM data: You can upload a list of your current contacts and run them through CarrierLookup. This lets you flag or remove invalid or suspicious numbers already in your system.
• Affordable API pricing: CarrierLookup charges very low rates per lookup (around $0.01 per query) for integrations and bulk processing, making validation costs much more manageable, even for large databases.
• API integration with CRMs and forms: CarrierLookup offers an API you can embed in forms or workflows (e.g., in Salesforce or HubSpot). You’ll remove the need to use separate software or manually upload lists just to validate numbers. 

So while services like Twilio, Telesign, and NumVerify can detect VoIP and temporary numbers, they lack the intuitiveness and lower cost suited for everyday lead validation. CarrierLookup focuses on providing fast, accurate carrier and line-type data. 

For teams that want verified contact data at scale, CarrierLookup is an efficient solution to stop fake leads, all without paying for features meant for telecom-grade systems.

Clean Data, Clear Results with CarrierLookup

Fake leads drain budgets, waste your team’s time, and put your data compliance at risk. 

Having clean data, on the other hand, drives higher ROI and sharper decision-making. You can achieve that with the right validation solution, which catches fake sign-ups early, keeps your CRM accurate, and gives your team confidence that every lead is real.

With the CarrierLookup, you can verify numbers at the source, filter out fake contacts, and keep your CRM focused on real prospects who convert. 

Start eliminating fake leads today with the CarrierLookup API, and make every dollar of your outreach count.

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Fake Leads FAQs

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How does CarrierLookup detect fake leads?

CarrierLookup.com identifies fake leads by checking the carrier and line type of a phone number. It flags invalid, disconnected, or high-risk numbers before they enter your CRM, helping you filter out contacts that are unlikely to convert.

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What’s the difference between validation & verification?

Validation ensures that a number is formatted correctly and exists in a numbering plan. Verification goes further by confirming that the number is active, belongs to a real carrier, and is reachable. Validation focuses on whether a number is usable for outreach, not the person or business behind the number.

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Can CarrierLookup stop fraud sign-ups?

Yes, Carrier Lookup helps reduce fraud by identifying invalid, disconnected, or suspicious numbers. It can’t stop every type of fraudulent activity, but it reduces fake sign-ups, saving your team time from poor data and protecting your marketing spend.

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Is it legal to use CarrierLookup for marketing?

Yes, as long as you comply with applicable regulations like TCPA, GDPR, or CCPA. CarrierLookup.com only checks carrier and line-type info, and it won’t bypass consent rules or send unsolicited messages. Always make sure that your outreach respects local privacy and messaging laws.

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