New research reveals a growing problem of fraud on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform. Using VPNs, respondents are gaining unauthorized access to studies and submitting low-quality data.
🔍 What We Did
We analyzed 38 existing MTurk studies to understand the scope of this issue.
📊 Our Findings
- Data quality is declining due to fraudulent access via VPNs, a problem that has worsened recently.
- Fraudulent respondents provide significantly lower-quality data than legitimate users.
- This low-quality input can weaken treatment effects in experiments.
🛠️ How We Help
Researchers now have two tools: an application to identify fraud in existing MTurk datasets and a method to block fraudulent access during Qualtrics surveys.
