(NewsNation) — Tip lines set up by lawmakers to report activity related to anti-transgender legislation in several states have been flooded with fake reports and messages of support by LGBTQ+ advocates and activists.  

In Utah, activists inundated a tip line created to alert state officials to possible violations of a new bathroom law with thousands of hoax reports in an effort to protect transgender residents from any legitimate complaints that could spur an investigation.

Under the legislation, Utah residents and visitors are ordered to use bathrooms and changing rooms in government-owned buildings that correspond with their birth sex, and agencies found violating the restrictions can be fined up to $10,000 per day for each violation.

That line has now received more than 10,000 largely false submissions. 

Utah Auditor John Dougall, who has been tasked with managing the line, is now filtering through fake complaints while also facing backlash for enforcing a law he had no role in passing.

“No auditor goes into auditing so they can be the bathroom monitors,” Dougall told the Associated Press. “I think there were much better ways for the Legislature to go about addressing their concerns, rather than this ham-handed approach.”

State representative Kera Birkeland and state senator Dan McCay, who sponsored the bathroom legislation, said they remain confident in the tip line. 

“It’s not surprising that activists are taking the time to send false reports,” Birkeland told the AP. “But that isn’t a distraction from the importance of the legislation and the protection it provides women across Utah.”

Erin Reed, a prominent trans rights activist and legislative researcher, said that submitting these hoax reports is an effective way of protesting the laws and protecting trans people who might be targeted. 

“If there are 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 form responses that are entered in, it’s going to be much harder for the auditor’s office to sift through every one of them and find the one legitimate trans person who was caught using a bathroom,” Reed said.

Similar efforts by LGBTQ+ advocates and supporters were launched in Missouri and Indiana. 

A tip line in Missouri created by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey in April 2023 to collect complaints about gender-affirming health care was shut down a month after launching after it was flooded with messages of support by transgender advocates.

St. Louis Public Radio reported that within 48 hours of operation, the line was jammed with trolling, jokes and insults directed at Bailey. 

In one of these emails, someone posted the script of the 2007 animated film “Bee Movie” and continued for more than 2,800 pages, according to the outlet. 

When it was shut down, Bailey’s office blamed “far-left activists … trying to impede parents’ ability to shed light on what happened to their children,” according to St. Louis Public Radio. 

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita launched a form earlier this year for reporting schools that teach about LGBTQ+ issues and Black history, among other topics. 

But when it went live, users began to flood it with memes, Pride flags and gender support plans, Advocate reported. 

Rokita said that investigators with his office would go through each submission to verify which ones were genuine but also noted that the site was intended for “self-policing,” according to the outlet. 

Reporting lines in Virginia, Arizona and Louisiana, created to field complaints about teachers, librarians and school administrators who may have spoken to students about race, LGBTQ+ identities or other topics lawmakers argued were inappropriate for children, were also slammed with thousands of activist messages. 

Virginia shut down its line less than a year after it launched.