Show vozrchikov voices on the Internet. Third season

For three years in a row, our company, SKB Kontur, has been holding a contest with the appropriate name “ I am a Businessman ” for small and medium business owners. The main stage of the competition takes place, of course, on the Internet. From year to year, its rules are slightly corrected, but are generally unchanged and quite simple: you need to have an officially registered business, make a short video about it, put it on the contest page and collect maximum votes.

To put a "like" for a particular video, you need to leave your mobile phone number in the voting form. SMS will come to him with a unique code with which you can leave one vote. Only five SMS messages can be sent from one number during the competition.

The amount of prizes in the main nominations of the competition is quite impressive. Perhaps that is why there are certainly participants who are ready to use not quite honest ways to get votes for the sake of victory. Despite all our warnings, the twists become more, and their methods are more technological and elegant.
For three years we were able to make a rating of the most popular methods of obtaining votes (honest and dishonest). Hopefully, our article will help someone to make contests with voting more transparent, and, well, twists - certain conclusions.

Top 5 dishonest ways

1. Anonymizer + virtual phone number

This method was particularly popular during the competition “I am a businessman 2015”. Its essence lies in the lease of several virtual numbers and the use of a proxy server to maintain the uniqueness of the list of IP addresses of voters. They bought virtual numbers in services like onlinesim.ru , receivesmsonline.com , etc. Some contestants frankly came across this:
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Of course, to deduct votes by searching for such manipulations in open sources would be wrong. Therefore, we carefully looked at the regional affiliation of telephone numbers and IP addresses from which they voted for the video.

2. Exchange of tasks for routine work

Some contestants placed tasks on such sites with a simple algorithm of actions for performers. Tasks looked like this:



Sources of such conversions can be easily viewed, for example, in Google Analytics:

3. Buying video views

Part of the contestants did not pay for certain tasks, but for viewing their video with targeting to the whole world. Apparently in the hope that they will vote for the video even without knowing the Russian language:



We also deducted such voices during the final count.

4. Messages on social networks with promises to share the prize in case of winning

Some contestants promised to share their prize, or even give it up entirely to those who voted:

5. Spam mailing in social networks

Some participants sent messages to a random (or just not obvious to us) sample of users with whom they had no social connections. The messages contained a request to vote for a specific video and instructions on how to do this:



According to our observations, even a certain group of “helpers” was formed, who found the participants' accounts in social networks and specifically offered a vote wrap:



It looks like the top five most popular ways of cheating voices. But it is much more pleasant to talk about how “law-abiding” participants called for themselves to vote.

How to fight fair

1. Social networks

Among honest ways to encourage the public to vote for their video, of course, leading social networks. Participants posted messages on their personal and corporate pages, actively reposted and liked information about the competition, and even created communities:

2. Forums

The second most popular way to attract an audience was various thematic forums. For example, one participant (father of many children and a beekeeper by occupation) in various forums created messages adapted to the audience of the resource:




By the way, it was he who won the nomination "Internet voting", gaining 3,428 votes.

3. Corporate websites

Some participants who have their own corporate sites, posted on them information about the competition:

4. Support local people

Somehow, some participants agreed with various local regional portals to publish news with an appeal to vote for a fellow countryman:

Controversial moments

At one of the participants, we found “bundles” of 20-30 votes with a difference of 1-2 minutes. As it turned out later, among the supporters of the contestants were teachers who called for their students to vote. Although we do not support such methods, but according to the rules of the competition, we were not entitled to deduct votes.

Funny moments

One of the contestants asked for help in voting on the leprosorium.ru site that is well-known in narrow circles, and this is what came of it.
The message itself:



And the reaction of users:

Total

According to statistics, during all the contests, 46 participants used the wrap (9% of the total). In total, it was possible to identify about 26,800 winding up votes (almost 22% of the total). According to our rough estimates, the participants spent a total of about 80 thousand rubles and a large number of hours of their own precious time.