Probably one of the most important aspects of any web run contest is the need for top tier security, and we take that seriously. The Security page of your contest is where you'll find any activity that has been automatically flagged by our system.
In this case, you'll note the email has been hidden, but their suspicious activity has been noted for using "Incognito Mode," which when combined with other activities can be signs of fraud.
This next example comes from one of our client contests where once again our system automatically flagged a user IP address and provided reasoning.
Note this address is flagged as a "High" risk, due to the use of an AWS service, allowing a user to create a script to automate voting. We actively track and flag 13 different types of fraud to keep your contest secure.
Next we'll look at the IP Drilldown which provides an overall look at votes by IP address.
From this page, you can see the number of Signups, Unique Voted Nominations and Votes. The last two numbers are of particular importance, as a low number of unique nominations versus a high number votes can tell us if someone is likely attempting to cheat.
Taking a closer look at those numbers, you can see
a discerning pattern with our first two entries. Despite
over 1000 signups, we only see 10 nominations voted
on. The second entry is similar.
Meanwhile the next entry shows a more diverse number
of voted nominations. Let's dig in a little further to investigate
by clicking on the offending IP address.
You can quickly see a pattern emerging.
Who ever created this account has used a free email service, in this case gmail to generate emails using a first name, period, last name followed by three numbers.
Furthermore, if we note the votes are all for 7 nominations and happening every few minutes. These are all signs of a bot farm or programmed series of actions being performed. It's likely if we kept scrolling we would see these votes happening at odd times as well, as most businesses wouldn't be receiving consistent votes at 4 in the morning.
Our platform automatically flags 13 different forms of vote fraud to keep your contest on the up-and-up. With security done, we move onto Advertising.
If this wasn't helpful, click this link to submit a support ticket.