Our first exposure to fraud
We’re doing a couple of interesting projects at Kindfish right now as we work out all the kinks in the system. One of the projects was a baby search competition we helped run for a local COX Radio station. Parents would submit photos of their baby, and the cutest baby (as voted by our users) would win a couple of free tickets to the upcoming Birthday Bash concert.
Never in a million years would I have expected what happened. The day after we rolled out the competition we have 5000 new accounts, 90% of which were not legitimate. Some of the babies had over 1000 votes _overnight_. People actually started talking shit about each other’s babies. We scrambled to make unique email validation necessary for voting, but even with that implemented we still had hundreds of new accounts being created with emails like joe01@yahoo, joe02@yahoo, joe03@yahoo, etc. Unbelievable. These people must have spent all day sitting in front of their computer creating fake profiles just to vote for their baby.
I just never realized how important baby photos were. Remarkable.
