Cheating and Fraud
Gleam has a number of ways to protect you from users cheating in your competitions. We have worked hard to ensure that this process should involve as little manual intervention as possible, however it depends on how thorough you want to be in checking entries.
Gleam screens every entry for fraud automatically. You can tighten that before launch, then check your winners before you announce them. The video walks through six steps:
- Set your Fraud Level on the Pre-Entry tab. High is the default. Drop to Off only for live events on shared wifi, or go up to Very High for bigger prizes.
- Switch on Contestant Verification to send entrants a code by email or SMS (SMS needs the Twilio integration).
- Invalid entries never go into your draw.
- Decide when to make an entry valid again. Only the first entrant from one household or IP gets valid entries, so restore the rest if your terms allow it.
- Block a user from the menu next to their entry on the Actions / Entries tab.
- Re-check your winner before you announce them, and repick if something is wrong.
Once you pick a winner you'll be able to see all of the information and details about that user and their entries. This will allow you to do a final validation of their entries before awarding the win or deciding to repick.
On Hobby and above you can access all entry data and validate or investigate entries before drawing winners.
The Block User feature is available on all paid plans, and it's applied at the Site level, which means blocked users cannot access Competitions or Rewards belonging to the same Site.
You can find this option on the Actions / Entries tab, or the Users tab for all campaigns.
Gleam integrates with a lot of different API's, we use these API's to validate that entrants have in fact completed what you have asked.
Where a platform lets us check, an action has to be done before the entry counts. X is different. Entrants log in with X, so you know the account is really theirs, and Gleam can block throwaway accounts. Nothing checks with X that they followed, reposted, liked or posted, so check X actions by hand before you announce a winner. Where possible, we also try to provide you URLs and links to the completed action in your Actions list (in-case you need to verify).
See what Verified Actions are for how we check entries before they count.
There's cases where this isn't always possible too, for example with the X Web Intent box - it can tell us that an entrant posted, but for security reasons won't give us the URL of the post. So we know it has been done, just not exactly what the exact post is.
Quite often users may delete one of their entries after completion. Unfortunately this isn't something we track, however it's an easy thing to manage.
You only really need to check valid entries when you are picking a Winner. Simply click the User icon next to the Globe icon and you can review all other entries from that winner (to ensure they've completed everything you asked).
If anything seems out of order you can revoke the win, invalidate the entries then repick another Winner.
If you choose a winner but then realize that their entry is invalid for any reason you can invalidate & repick another winner. This is useful if perhaps you asked users to complete a certain task & they didn't complete it, or if the user subscribed to a mailing list but has unsubscribed when you checked again.
Not sure why an entry was marked invalid? See what an Invalid Entry is.
We use a number of techniques to detect fraudulent behavior, this happens in real-time within ~5 minutes of an entry being received. This protection ensures that you will see reduced entry manipulation, plus you will not see those emails getting carried through to your 3rd party mailing lists.
If an action has been invalidated you will see the reason why in your actions list:
You will see the invalidated number of actions in the email we send you when the contest is over, you will also see them highlighted on the Reporting tab of your contest:
Note: x entries were invalidated due to suspicion of cheating.
We've been working on this for over a year now. It's been designed to be as non-intrusive for the end users as possible, whilst protecting your campaigns from spam (and saving you time).
The widget also has mechanisms in place to require extra layers of validation from users, if say for example lots of people are all entering from the same office at once.
Users will not be aware if their actions are in invalid in the backend, they will still see that they have the full number of credited entries.
Invalid actions do not count towards your reporting on the Reporting tab.
You are shown exactly how many actions have automatically be flagged, then given the chance to manually review them yourself.
We often get this particular question, and it relates to the privacy of our entrants.
Gleam is a free platform that allows anyone to collect data from their campaigns and attribute it to an email address. IPs on their own aren't dangerous, but once you start showing IP addresses that are linked to identifiable user data they can be used maliciously. At Gleam we are very serious about protecting the data of our customers, but also the data of the entrants that enter competitions too.
We still provide a robust way to filter entries from the same IP address (without exposing the actual IP). Open the Actions menu on any entry's row and choose Actions from User IP to see a comprehensive list of all other actions completed under that IP address. It'll even show actions that we've already marked as invalid.
Want to know what you're up against? See what giveaway bots are and how they affect contests.
See Next Article
Announcing Winners
Once you have chosen all your winners you can choose to announce them in the widget with or without avatars. We will never reveal the full name of the winner, just the first name & first letter of the surname.