Thursday, January 21, 2021

Entitled Influencer's Dad Disputes Contest, Ruins Entire Project


All it had to be was a dumb marketing project with some giveaway stuff, but one "do you know who my father is" type just had to be involved. Overzealous and aggressive parents speaking on behalf of their children can lead to a lot of pain and suffering down the road, like this parent who blamed a teacher for their own kid not being in virtual class.

1.

Text - Posted by u/EstamelTharchon 3 days ago How an obsessed parent can lose you your biggest client Long I've told this story to all my friends, and I suppose it's time I share it with you. I'm a developer at an $agency. Our biggest client at the time was $bank. Apparently, banks in our area have a huge hard-on for raffles, giveaways, and similar marketing tricks to get new accounts opened. Better yet, they are constantly trying to one-up each other, which is great for marketing/developer agen

2.

Text - We present them with an idea for their next big thing: • We get 20 young influencers to take photos of themselves with some bank cards and stuff. All of them some small-scale school-age influencers paid a symbolic amount of money. • I reate an Instagram clone, where people vote for their favorite photo. Each week, a new set of photos opens up and voting starts again, for a total of 8 weeks. • Everyone who participates in voting enters a raffle, and the influencer with the most votes gets

3.

Text - I was the sole developer for this job, which meant I had the opportunity to take out the fanciest tools in my toolbox. I was quite proud of the end product. It was done on time, on budget, well tested, and could handle tons of traffic. Then, the campaign goes live. Voting starts, traffic exceeds our expectations, everything on my side is working great. On the second day of the campaign, an 18-year-old $influencerGirl gets a massive spike in vote count during a 1 hour period. Immediately a

4.

Text - The $veryImportantDad is threatening us in every possible way he can. Negative social media posts, complaining to $bank, boycotting the campaign by getting other participants on board, and somehow threatening legal action. In the same email, he mentions at least 3 times how his son is a huge social media personality, how we should be lucky to even have him in the game, how he didn't even want to participate in such a small-scale event, and just how impossible it is for him to receive fewe

5.

Text - While the security was done right, auditing and logs were inadequate for this investigation. Server access logs contained IP addresses and such but contained no information that would allow me to connect HTTP requests to actual users and who they voted for. Authentication was done either via Google SSO, Facebook SSO, or SMS code verification. Database records were consistent, so I ended up browsing through the SSO data, trying to spot any sign of multiple dummy Google or Facebook accounts

6.

Text - The best proof I could come up with was the ratio between different authentication methods. If $influencerGirl cheated, the makeup of the accounts that voted for her would be different from the rest of the accounts. In layman's terms, if the app had 40% of users registered via Google, 35% via Facebook, and 25% via SMS, and the accounts that voted for her had the same ratio (or at least, not different enough for any statistical significance), it would 99% prove that she did not cheat. If s

7.

Text - The people at $bank did not quite understand the mathematics, so my investigation failed to reach any conclusions. So they did the obvious. A lawyer from $bank called $influencerGirl to ask her how she got those votes. Turns out she was an animator at a college party, where she picked up the mic and told everyone to vote for her. She then signed a statement that this was true. For the remaining weeks, we were stalling $veryImportantDad, telling him that the investigation is in progress an

8.

Text - In the end, the campaign exceeded all KPIS, some by a factor of 10, and would be considered a massive success, were it not for the accusations of cheating. It put a strain on our relationship with the $bank and we received no future projects like this from them. Eventually, they pulled all their work.

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