Cheating and viral campaigns

Inspired by this blog article on a Google / Da Vinci Code fiasco.

I often encounter cheating in the viral campaigns we create. To me it is simply part of the game - Get your enjoyment in any way that you see fit. One attempt stands out from the crowd though…

4T2 were running a racing game competition for Exchange & Mart in 2003. The game recorded your laps making cheating very hard as you could watch a replay of any previous performance. Check out X-chase. As this is not live any more we do not monitor it. The people claiming to have completed a lap time in one second are hacking the game. However, they will not have a valid recording. At the time we deleted these players.

The prize was a new Pay As You Go mobile phone – WOW.

One morning I received an email from Exchange & Mart informing me that the current leader was cheating and requesting that we delete his entry. I can only find the version I forwarded to our client but here you go. Click on the image below:


So I watched a replay of the current leader and could not see anything wrong with it. I was also very surprised at the pro-activeness of our client to do all of this. Therefore I took a second look at the email. Check out the email address.


Therefore I emailed “Tanya” back and received a complete confession from a suitably guilty sounding young man. He simply wanted to win and had invested so much time in this endeavour that he was willing to try anything.

I can’t remember if we sent him a prize for doing this or not - I hope we did. But hey, if you invest this much effort into a brands marketing campaign, surely you should be rewarded.