How to avoid fraud in your campaign

1. Introduction.

In those campaigns in which the participant can get a juicy benefit, such as free samples, or those with voting, such as photo contests with voting, it is common to find participants who use mischief and bad practices to get more participation and votes: participation with different emails, fake emails, vote-buying...

For this reason, in Cool Tabs, we have different mechanisms and features to control and minimize fraud and offer transparency and greater legality to the other participants of your campaigns.

2. Mechanisms used in our new anti-fraud system.

Below is a list of features that you can activate as preventive measures to avoid fraudulent participation or voting.

2.1. Restrictions on participation.

2.1.1. Restriction by country.

You can limit participation to a specific country or countries, to further define the target audience of your campaign. In this way, only users accessing from the countries you determine will be able to participate in the campaign. Users will not even be able to access the participation form.

To configure the restriction by country, see the tutorial on How to restrict or limit participation in a campaign.

2.1.2. Restrictions by IP.

Another option is to limit participation by IP to a certain number of times. In this way, you can avoid a user from participating with different identities, for example, 10 times with different valid emails, which can be theirs and those of family members.

Keep in mind that there may be several users who participate from the same home or office, and the limitation prevents their participation.

To configure the IP restriction, see the tutorial on How to restrict or limit participation in a campaign.

2.1.3. Restrictions by number of participations.

You can also control participation by setting limits on the number of participations per user. Either to one in the whole campaign or in each of the phases.

To determine the maximum number of participations that can be made by each user, see the tutorial on How to restrict or limit participation in a campaign.

2.2. Blocking invalid votes.

You can activate different features to control voting fraud in your campaign, which will invalidate the vote.

Go to the 'Votes' section of the campaign edition and activate the checkbox 'Enable voting on entries'.

Several mechanisms are available:

• Activate the vote limit. By default, a user can vote once for each of the different participations. If you have configured a "Choose your favorite" campaign, you may want a user, for example, to be able to vote only once to choose his favorite or 3 times if he has to choose his 3 favorite photos.
• Limit the countries from which you can vote.
• Block voters from possible vote exchange networks. We have built a database of users who have voted in hundreds of our campaigns and possibly participate in exchange networks. If you activate this option, the votes of these participants will not be accepted in the campaign (they will see a message "Invalid vote"). In addition, you will be able to see which participants receive votes from these users, so you will be able to detect if these participants are participating in these exchange networks.
• Block fraudulent votes. When a user tries to cheat by using several profiles from the same computer, we will block their votes.
• Block votes from the same IP. This functionality seeks to persuade users who try to vote from several computers and with different profiles. Until N minutes have passed since the previous vote, it will not be possible to vote.

Therefore, we will consider a vote to be invalid:

1. When more than one vote is received from a single computer.
2. When a vote is submitted from an unauthorized country.
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.
4. 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.

2.4. Validate the participant's email. 

When setting up the campaign, you have the option to ask the participant to verify their email address. In this way, you will prevent users from participating in the campaign with a false or unused email address.

After completing the data form, the participant receives a validation email to the email address he/she has indicated. Only once the email has been confirmed, he/she will be considered a participant of the campaign.

To activate the email verification, please refer to the tutorial on How to enable user email validation after participating.

3. Other specifications.

If you have any questions, please contact us at help@cool-tabs.com.

4. Related content.

How to restrict or limit participation in a campaign.

Best practices in Instant Win campaigns.