Hi Cecile,
In case this is new to you, we recently found out that there is such a thing as “vote exchange” and a “voting mafia” on Facebook.
We ran two contests during the past months and experienced this.
During our the recent Father’s Day contest, we saw some entries that were earning 100+ votes in half a day so we became very suspicious.
Upon investigating, we saw votes from people with Middle Eastern- or Chinese-sounding names, locked profiles—most of which had only under 10 friends.
One contestant had 280+ likes while 80% of the votes were not on his Friends list.
The voting ‘mafia’ had names that started with Ab or Ac, i.e. AbAnna Gonzalez. Or some would have Pinoy pictures with Caucasian names.
It was tedious but we went through the likes of each entry (we had about 35). If we saw ‘likes’ that were suspicious, we disqualified them (internally from our list).
Just before we announced the finalists, we deleted the fraudulent entries and banned them from our page.
It’s not difficult to “detect” fraudsters. As the promo organizer, it is easy to just turn a blind eye because our main objective was to reach as many people as we can. But when you think about the people who really campaigned to garner votes, you just want to do the right thing.
This link explains everything:
http://www.contestmob.com/blog/how-to-identify-cheaters-who-use-facebook-vote-exchange/
(Name withheld for privacy)
Originally published at Chuvaness.com. You can comment here or there.