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Tips to avoid cheating in your online competitions
Updated over 2 months ago

In all types of competition, participants may use group support or competition forums to take part in a competition several times, in order to increase their chances of winning. Many voting competitions are also criticised for vote fraud. These suspicions must of course be verified so that the necessary measures can be taken. You can also put in place measures to prevent fraud in your competitions as far as possible.

How do you identify fraud and verify a suspicion of fraud?

In your Socialshaker backoffice, you can export the data filled in by participants in the game form. This export enables you to manually check voters' profiles, for example. The information that can be used to suspect fraud is :

  • Inaccurate data, surnames/first names reused several times for several different email addresses

  • Invalid email addresses

In the case of a voting competition: invalid or repeated IP addresses.

Disqualification criteria

Do you suspect fraud and don't want to reward a winner who has won a prize by breaking the rules? Use Participant Export to manually check voters' profiles and, in your rules, take the initiative by specifying all the reasons that could lead to disqualification:

  • Eligibility to participate in a given geographical area.

  • Misrepresentation of identity or incorrect data: a participant is defined as a single natural and legal person; consequently, any use of different e-mail addresses for the same participant will be considered an attempt at fraud resulting in disqualification of his/her participation and ineligibility to become a winner. An entry will also be deemed invalid if a disposable e-mail address is used: youmail.com, youpymail.com, yopmail.com, brefmail.com, mailcatch.com, yopmail.fr, yopmail.net, cool.fr.nf, etc.

  • Participation is limited to 1 per household. Any entry with a similar IP will be considered invalid.

  • Persons who have not provided proof of their full contact details and identity or who have provided them inaccurately or falsely will be disqualified.

In the case of a photo or video competition, for example, our model rules that can be edited on the platform also include a clause in article 3 that can be used in these cases: ‘The organiser reserves the right to modify the selection of the winners by involving a panel of judges who will elect the participants to the winners’ rank’.

Fraud prevention

Socialshaker offers a number of options to protect you from any attempts at fraud, all of which can be configured directly on the platform.

  • Set up IP blocking from the Mechanics > Limitations tab to prevent the same participant from taking part several times with different email addresses. The limitation will take effect for the duration of the campaign.

  • In the ‘ Form’ tab, you can activate a Captcha check for each entry to prevent any attempts by robots.

  • In the ‘Configuration’ section of the game, set up Geoblocking to prevent entries from countries other than those authorised for your game. Any IPs not concerned will be blocked.

💡 This feature can sometimes block people from authorised countries, because IP addresses are not always accurate. For example, people living near borders may be misidentified. Using a VPN can help you get around these geographical restrictions.

  • You can also place a dissuasive statement in the form step: ‘ Every entry and vote is checked; any entry that does not comply with our rules may result in disqualification’.

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