Dashboard: How to Manage Fraud Guard

Fairness is one of the biggest concerns that clients have when it comes to running an online contest. At Strutta, we appreciate the importance of fairness in every contest we put our name on, and we have a number of fraud prevention and detection measures in place.

We start with a secure sign-up process with the option of requiring an email authentication or using Facebook Connect to identify the visitor. Participants can create an account for the contest site or, if it enabled on the contest site, log in with Facebook Connect using their existing Facebook account's information

Email authentication lets us know that a human is participating, and not a robot. This also allows us to effectively track and identify all activity logged in a contest. In addition to registration and on-site messaging, voter-fraud filters are working in the background to identify suspicious activity.

As a way to control fraudulent votes and excessive voting, our system limits the number of votes per computer (IP address) up to 10 per hour.

Our technology tracks IP addresses along with a number other factors that alert us of suspicious voting activity. Many situations are brought to our attention as suspicious, such as voting in a shared environment like a classroom. However, upon manual review we can clearly see what is fraudulent or not.

In your Admin Dashboard > Moderate > Fraud the Strutta Fraud Guard will help you track the level of suspicious voting activity. The number of votes per IP address and per computer are monitored, giving you an easy-to-read way of identifying the bad from the good.

The most common case is duplicate entries; ie, joesmith@yahoo.com, joesmith@hotmail.com, joesmith@gmail.com, joesmith@network.com, etc. In this case, only one vote will remain on behalf of Joe Smith as the rules state one vote per person per entry.

No blame is ever placed on individuals. We simply identify suspicious votes and make recommendations based on the data collected in order keep the contest fair on all counts.

For more information on the technology behind our Fraud Guard process, see this post or contact us at info@strutta.com

We can help conduct fraud checks across all entries in a contest upon request.