IPM (was the ISP) warning on fraudulent online entries

Marketing Week has reported that the Institute of Sales Promotion (now the IPM) is advising marketers and agencies to tighten up on terms and conditions relating to online competitions, because of a massive increase in multiple entries by consumers.

In some of the worst cases, thousands of entries have been traced back to single individuals.

Some competitions will allow people to enter more than once, but most restrict individuals, or sometimes households, to only one entry.

However, the Internet has made it very easy for someone to enter multiple times when they are not supposed to.

At the simplest level, this might be by creating a range of email addresses and entering once with each address. At a more sophisticated level, people have written computer programs or ‘scripts’ to automate the entry process, effectively launching hack attacks on competitions sites.

Philip Circus, the ISP’s (now the IPM) director of legal affairs, says: “We have seen cases where individuals have entered hundreds if not thousands of times and have won multiple prizes, which they have then sold off. This raises two issues. Firstly, other people are discouraged from entering; and secondly, it undermines the commercial value of the data being collected.”

David Carr, head of interactive at Chemistry Communications Group and an advisory director to the ISP’s Board, says: “There is a moral issue but also a business one, which is that many online promotions are driven by customer acquisition and data collection, and multiple entries or voids can seriously affect the quality of initial data and KPIs.”

An ISP (now IPM) working party including Carr, Circus and Neil Barnes, founder of promotion verification and security specialist Enable, has been looking into the issue.

It is now advising anyone running any competitions or prize draws which can be entered digitally to make it absolutely clear in the terms and conditions what restrictions apply, including whether individuals can enter only once, whether they can enter multiple times but win only once and whether households are restricted to one prize only.

Marketers and agencies are also being advised to specify in the T&Cs that if it becomes apparent that individuals are attempting to make multiple entries, for example by using multiple e-mail addresses or through brute force script attacks, they will be disqualified, they will not get any prizes from that competition and they will be banned from entering future competitions.

Ref. ISP web site http://www.isp.org.uk/news.php?pid=613