I took a look at the competition entries thus far for the Wish You Were Competition NPF is currently running this morning and there were nearly 4,000 entries which is about 2,500 more than usual. After some further investigation, I discovered that some clever German has written some computer software that automatically enters competitions using a bot with thousands of email addresses at its disposal and, more annoyingly, hundreds of IP addresses too so it is difficult to spot them as being a spammer.
There business is to enter so many entries into a competition that they are very likely to win the competition they are entering. However, at NPF, the winning competition entry is checked very carefully to make sure it is not a bot or a duplicate entry from someone. Indeed, there are several things in our competition software that looks for duplicate email addresses, IPs and a couple of other hidden factors to determine if the competition entry is unique or not. Having all these IPs and email addresses is proving to be a slight issues though.
The company doing this is called Travelresearch Ltd and has registered many web addresses that they use for email only. There is no website present at the web addresses. This is good because, when I pick a winner at random using my Excel spreadsheet with random number generator.selector, I can then look at their email domain address and see if what website it is and who it is registered to. So, the fools at Travelresearch Lts who are abusing competitions all over the place are not going to win at NPF so might as well do one!
One such record of a domain is below. All their domains have the same nameserver so I may have to contact them about this particular customer if they don’t also own the domain registrar! Fools.
Domain name:
moussenetmail.co.uk
Registrant:
Travelresearch Ltd.
Registrant type:
Unknown
Registrant's address:
Drygalski-Allee 118 / App. 1303
Muenchen
81477
Germany
Registrar:
IPHH Internet Port Hamburg GmbH [Tag = IPHH-DE]
URL: http://www.iphh.de
Relevant dates:
Registered on: 27-Feb-2008
Renewal date: 27-Feb-2012
Last updated: 18-Mar-2011
Registration status:
Registered until renewal date.
Name servers:
ns1.iphh.de
ns2.iphh.de
WHOIS lookup made at 14:25:00 22-Nov-2011
