Throughout the history of Cool Tabs, we have seen how campaign participants and voters are born, grow, and even “multiply”. This is why we have increased the mechanisms and techniques that allow our users to control and minimise fraud. In this way, we make sure that the participants who take part in the promotions created with our platform are really interested in the campaign and in the brand, thus contributing to increase engagement and potentially becoming clients for its products and services.

Mechanisms used in our new anti-fraud system

Thanks to the comprehensive analysis we perform in campaigns, we have come up with several preventive measures to help you decide whether or not a participation or a vote is fraudulent:

1. Limiting the number of countries:

You can now restrict the campaign to just one country or several countries for you to further define the target public of your promotion, while simultaneously avoiding excessive buzz and vote exchange practices among countries.  This means that participations submitted from other countries will not be valid. These users will not even been able to access the entry form and votes coming from countries other than the countries selected for the campaign will not be valid, giving you the choice to decide whether you want to keep them blocked or validate them. As votes goes, invalid votes will be gathered, so that it can be established whether or not the participant has been engaged in a vote exchange network. If the participant receives many votes from a country different from his/her own, chances are that s/he is cheating.

• You can now select the countries from where you want to receive participations. This can be done from your campaign settings, on the ‘Participation dates and configuration’ section:

• You will be able to choose the countries from where votes for contributions in competitions can be submitted. This can be done from your campaign settings, on the ‘Votes dates and configuration’ section:

2. Identifying users who are trying to carry out fraudulent practices in competitions.

We have created a system that makes it easier for you to identify users who engage in fraudulent actions in promotions and competitions created with our platform.

How are these users detected? A control system has been installed  to detect users who have already taken part in many campaigns created through Cool Tabs, or those who have participated in competitions and have received votes from many different countries (as this can mean that the user is engaged in vote exchange networks).

Any participation suspected to come from one of these “users who have potentially been engaged in fraudulent activities” will be listed as “Published pending“. Moreover, an email will be automatically sent to the administrator, including the participation that is awaiting moderation, for him/her to decide whether or not it is a valid participation.

This control system is optional. You can enable it on the field shown in the image below, on the “Participation dates and configuration” section. However, if you disable this option, no filter will be applied to participations and the administrator will not receive any alerts.

This mechanism is a preventive measure that may look very restrictive, but it usually works well and manages to identify most of the participants who have committed a fraud. Whenever the administrator receives the email including the participation awaiting moderation, s/he will ideally access the profile of the user who has tried to participate and check whether or not s/he is cheating and, therefore, decide if his/her participation is valid. If you are looking for an effective measure, this is definitely an infallible one.

3. Blocking invalid votes.

When is a vote declared invalid?

1. When more than one vote is received from a single computer.
2. When a vote is submitted from an unauthorised country (as explained in section 1).
3. When more than one vote is submitted from a single IP before the time frame you have specified in the campaign settings form (“Voting dates and configuration” section) has expired.

1. When users have voted in a lot of campaigns created with Cool Tabs and we understand that they may come from vote exchange networks.

In these four cases, votes will be considered not valid. However, the administrator can validate them at any time from the votes panel.

These are the 3 mechanisms which will be used to avoid fraud in our campaigns. Based on the ongoing competitions which already include this new anti-fraud system, we can say that it is practically unequivocal and we hope you find it useful for your promos and competitions.

Launch your competitions in Cool Tabs with the new anti-fraud system!