Not every fake signup is out to defraud you. Some just want to grab a lead magnet without handing over a real address, or to look around without being contactable. But the accounts that do cause trouble, promo abusers, spammers, scrapers casing your app, tend to share two traits: a disposable email and an anonymising connection.
Why the combination matters
On their own, each is weak evidence. Plenty of privacy-minded people use a VPN. Some genuinely use a throwaway address because they have been burned by spam before. But a brand-new account, using a disposable inbox, arriving through a VPN or proxy, with nothing else to vouch for it, is a different proposition, and it rarely turns into a paying, engaged user.
Screen the signal, keep the door open
The mistake is to hard-block on any one flag; you will turn away real people. The better pattern is graduated:
- Clean email, home connection: let them in with no friction.
- One flag: allow, but ask for email verification before granting anything valuable.
- Both flags on a fresh account: require verification and withhold promos or trials until the account proves real.
Nobody is refused. You are just matching the level of trust to the level of evidence.
Measure before you tighten
Log the connection verdict on signups for a week and compare it to which accounts ever became active or paid. The disposable-plus-VPN accounts almost always sit at the dead end of that funnel. Fraudex gives you the VPN, proxy and datacenter verdict on each signup in a single call, so you can match friction to risk instead of guessing.