No one would ever tell you that a contest platform can’t be gamed. If you are giving away something with significant value then people will try and game any system to take advantage of it.
At KickoffLabs our customers HAVE given away several thousands of dollars worth of credits, products, cash, and other prizes in enormously successful contests. They have done so with confidence that they have the guidance and tools to avoid awarding scammers. Here’s how we can help and how you can help yourself feel more confident.
Automatic Detection at KickoffLabs
Using our Advanced Fraud Prevention, Business and Enterprise level plans get access to smart tools to help stop scammers.
1. Verified lead campaigns
You can enable Campaign Lead Verification. This is the safest solution for contests with significant value because it will require individuals to manually confirm their entry in the contest via email (commonly known as double opt-in).
No reward emails or totals will be sent to people that have not verified. If a verified account refers 100 unverified fake signups those signups will NOT count in their totals.
2. Advanced IP blocking
Using Lead Filtering, all leads should have a unique IP address. Any duplicate IP addresses are automatically marked as suspicious. Leads and referrals from those addresses will not count in any totals that are used for automatic emails or reward distribution.
If you expect multiple signups from a trusted shared network, you can white list IP addresses (for example from an office, university, public workspace, etc).
3. Invalid email addresses are flagged
If an email address bounces we clearly mark it in your Lead Reports. This does require turning on the Automatic Reply Email.
4. Fake addresses are flagged
Additionally, we automatically detect disposable emails (like from Mailinator and 1,000’s of other bad email domains) which are also clearly marked in your Lead Reports.
5. Entries from known sweepstakes sites can be ignored
There are sites where people just post to get referrals to giveaways. You can choose to exclude entries from these sites from your campaign.
6. Captcha can be enabled to prevent robot entries
You can setup a captcha on your campaign. This means leads may be required to answer a visual question before entering.
7. We’d tell you, but we’d have to kill you
We do more behind the scenes to prevent fraud based on our experience but we don’t want to publicly post all those secrets online for people to start working around. 🙂
Need help? Let us know at support@kickofflabs.com!