Form validation being bypassed

please be gentle on me.

I have a Laravel 5.8 based website which has a html form. The form responses are handled by a controller which emails a copy of the data to us and also saves the data in a mysql database after having been validated by the controller. It all works lovely, however....

The thing is, we are receiving a number of responses (which follow a similar pattern of submitted values) that should be rejected by the validation. in fact, if I copy and paste the values from one of these email responses into the form on the website and submit it, it does fail validation.

This leads me to conclude that somehow data is being submitted in a way that bypasses the validation part of the controller.

I have scoured the internet and can find nothing that relates to the fault I'm seeing. Which leads me to the conclusion that it's definitely something I've done wrong.

The upshot is that I have spent days going round in circles trying this and tweaking that but nothing has made a difference so far I have no idea where to go with this and I'm hoping that some of you clever people could at least point me in the direction of a list of likely things to check.

As I said previously the site functions fine and if I use the forms on the site, validation works. Therefore I haven't included any code. I know it's all a bit vague and if I can provide any further information please shout.

Thanks in advance

via Chebli Mohamed