Okay I need a consensus from the group here and some thoughts on if I was getting rolled in this situation.
On one of the sites I work on we were running a refferal contest and giving away some pretty awesome prizes to members who coud refer new members.
We were running the refferal contest through a Vbulletin add on script that provided us with very comprehensive data on our refferals. As you can imagine, any time you give away free money or prizes in a contest like this, there are bound to be people trying to scam you. Usually people are so dumb they try signing up multiple accounts from the same I.P. but here is an interesting one.
One of our members who claimed to be 100% legit and was towards the top of the contest threw up some red flags though when I looked deeper into it. Tell me what you think.
For round number sake, we'll say this member sent us 150 new people to the community through his refferal link. And to give him the benefit of the doubt, all but 2 sign-ups were different I.P.'s. He claims to not know how to use proxies also.....hmmmm.
Anyhow here are a few things that raised some red flags and leads me to believe that this individual is scamming our contest. I'd like to hear what you woud think if you were the one fronting the money.
1.
95% of his refferals signed up at the forum and immediatly left within seconds after registering. None of them even visited a single post or ever returned, yes
95% of his refferals. To me this doesn't seem logical that this many people would randomly sign up in a forum but then never even read a single post????? Also very coincidental that they all came through his refferal link.
2. 90% of his refferals had email addresses that were hotmail, aol, or yahoo. More interesting is that half of these had the same email name as their username on the forum. For example user bear123 woud be
bear123@aol.com....... just seems like a strange coincidence and something someone registering multiple accounts would do.
3. Often times if he had say 7 refferals in one day, they all came within the same 2-3 hour time period.
Of course we did what almost any of you would do after seeing these back-end stats and we banned this member. Now he is trying to say that yea there are some strange coincidences but he just sends the traffic and cannot control if
95% of his refferals signed up and immediatly left without ever even going into the forums.
I have been doing internet marketing for a fair amount of time and I like to think of myself as being somewhat savvy. Maybe I am way off here, but the story doesn't seem to add up and it almost seems obvious to me that this guy was trying to scam the refferal contest.
Of course this guy is now saying he is seeking legal representation, lol......to that I say sue me, have your attorney subpoena my records and such. I hope you spend thousands to recoup a few hundred.
Take note the refferal contest rules also stated from day 1 "
By entering our referral contest you agree that **** admin may disqualify any suspicious account at any time without warning"
Any input or feedback you guys have on what I just presented here would be fabulous. Maybe my interpretation is way off here...........
Opinions - What would you think?
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