$$$ for WPI vote daily now in Vivint Round 2!

[eric_s]

Thanks, Helen, for finding all these things. It's really ugly. Conejo Valley CHEATING Circle is supposed to be a charity... Looks like their charitable work consists of taking money away from the people who actually deserve it.

It's no surprise if one considers how much can be won here, but nevertheless not nice. We might even look into wheter this constitutes fraud. In case of a competition i'm not certain, because Vivint would give away this money anyway, but it might be fraud. I will try to find out tomorrow and then we can see if we can turn up the heat for them a bit.

 

[eric_s]

One more idea i just had. These Friendship circles seem to exist in many places. There might be some sort of central, some umbrella organisation. I don't know if they would approve of what Conejo is doing. It has potential to hurt the reputation of the entire organisation. We should find out about how they are organised. And if this does not stop tell them we have the screenshots and daily vote staistics to document what the Conejo Valley chapter did. Tell them we will share this with media in their area, if they don't stop them. So everybody can see what their "charity" does. Sorry, but we can't let them steal this contest away from us in that way...

 

[helen41]

the link still works for me, and I can click on the offer and it takes me to the next page, so I don't think it has been taken down. I just can't figure out how to post it here. I ended up sending the screenshots to Nopostergirl and hopefully she can figure it out.

I earned a forensics diploma, I think she knows computers as well LOL

 

[No Poster Girl]

eric_s, Friendship Circle is a group that provides families that have mentally handicapped kids with teenage mentors for those kids. They spend time with them, giving their families a bit of respite and providing the kids with friends outside their family. Friendship Circle is a part of the Chabad Lubavitch movement. They are an Orthodox Jewish sect.

I learned a lot about them during the Chase contest, when they compensated votes and took five spots in the top fifteen, and pushed WPI down from 9th to 12th in the last 48 hours of the contest. You might read my blog series about this.

Chabad is well-known now for winning online contests. They won big in 2010 Kohl's Cares. They won big in Chase. There will be no censure here from the larger organization - trust me on this.

I've sent information to Vivint that I learned from my research during the Chase contest, but did not publish (as I didn't want to get sued) that identifies specific individuals who worked on the Chase effort and I believe are involved here too.

 

[No Poster Girl]

Helen, I can't get either of the links to work now. I have the screenshots you sent. If you're still around, take shots of the page it takes you to and email them to me, please.

 

[helen41]

I went thru the steps and took screenshots. I have to put my head down....I'll get it to you tomorrow

 

[Tuha]

unbelieveble how much they cheat. from the last update they got less vote than yeasterday. the question is if they are able to get a lot of ilegal votes constantly.
but they seem to be very motivated and who knows if they are not able to get 10 000 votes the last day if it will be necessary.
I am not so good in computers and I dont know how exactly they can check if someone is cheating but I would propose to thouse contests organisators:
- dont accept the votes from new created accounts (maybe the y could say it has to have at minimum 2 months history) - so they could elliminate the creation of faky accountsby the same person
- to say that they accept for example maximum 5 votesfrom the same IP adress
- to be strict if they find an organisation who is offering some prices for voting - at first to take some votes and if it continues then disqualifie the organisation

till now it seems that vivint didnt take any votes from conejo.
what i know chase was not at all strict this year - they just took a lot of votes from 1 organisation but thats everything. the year before when PANDORA was in competition their very much stricter and they took a lot of votes - i think almost every organisation lost the votes. this year I dont know if they gave up because I can imagine that its a lot of work to check everything or they just say that they dont care who is winning for whatever reason

 

[eric_s]

eric_s, Friendship Circle is a group that provides families that have mentally handicapped kids with teenage mentors for those kids. They spend time with them, giving their families a bit of respite and providing the kids with friends outside their family. Friendship Circle is a part of the Chabad Lubavitch movement. They are an Orthodox Jewish sect.

I learned a lot about them during the Chase contest, when they compensated votes and took five spots in the top fifteen, and pushed WPI down from 9th to 12th in the last 48 hours of the contest. You might read my blog series about this.

Chabad is well-known now for winning online contests. They won big in 2010 Kohl's Cares. They won big in Chase. There will be no censure here from the larger organization - trust me on this.

I've sent information to Vivint that I learned from my research during the Chase contest, but did not publish (as I didn't want to get sued) that identifies specific individuals who worked on the Chase effort and I believe are involved here too.

Thanks, that's very informative. I didn't know Friendship Circle is connected to the groups that we saw in CHASE.

I had one more idea. Are they a 501(c)(3) or however it's called? There might be some special regulations for these entities and an authority that watches them. What Conejo Valley is doing is immoral and also it might be that they use donors' money for buying the votes. Who knows, this might get them in trouble with the regulatory body. After all this contest is about 100'000$, so it's quite serious.

 

[eric_s]

I just found out Friendship Circle is a 501 (c)(3) http://www.friendshipcircle.org/templates/articlecco_cdo/aid/935620/jewish/Supporters.htm. I will look into how they are regulated. If there are any US lawyers here, feel free to help...

Here's about 501(c)(3)s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)#501.28c.29.283.29

Due to the tax deductions associated with donations, loss of 501(c)(3) status can be highly challenging to a charity's continued operation, as many foundations and corporate matching programs do not grant funds to a charity without such status, and individual donors often do not donate to such a charity due to the unavailability of the deduction.

They might be scared of losing that status

 

[eric_s]

Harvey Whittemore is a lawyer, i think. He's certainly already busy enough, but i think it would be good to forward this information (link to the ads, etc.) to Andrea Whittemore. And tell them they should look into wheter this could be fraud and into the possibilities of challenging Conejo Valley Friendship Circle's 501(c)(3) status. After all this is about 100'000$ for their institute. Can somebody write to Andrea Whittemore about this, please?

 

[helen41]

I don't believe that offering incentives for votes would be enough to make Friendship Circle lose a charity status, and lots of sponsors are fine with it. Chase was fine with it, and if we knew that, we would have done a raffle or something as well. Incentives were given last year in Vivint-one charity gave away $1000.
The three examples that we have found are not direct purchases. Close, but not as damning as offering money for a determined number of votes. Still, in this contest it is against the rules, and they continue to get those votes.
I have sent the other 2 links to no poster girl, and hopefully she can figure out why they won't post for me. Meanwhile, I will try to find another way of getting at those vote offers to ensure they are still live.

 

[No Poster Girl]

Helen is right. There's nothing illegal about what they're doing. What governs this matter is what rules Vivint made for the contest and how they decide to enforce them. Nothing more. Is this infuriating? Of course. But it's not illegal.

 

[eric_s]

Sorry, no offense meant, but are you lawyers? I could not finish my studies yet, thanks to ME/CFS, but i have studied law for some years. Not US law of course.

I am well aware that this is about a contract between participants and Vivint, as far as winning the contest is concerned. But then there is also the criminal law aspect (as i said, competitions are always on the border line as far as fraud is concerned, but it is a possibility). And then there is the public law aspect, regarding the 501 (c)(3) status. I did not say this is enough for them to lose that status, but it's always worth looking into. Chase was fine with it, but this is Vivint, and here it's prohibited. A charity that is potentially using donor money to cheat in a contest is clearly immoral and thus in breach of the very idea of a charity. This might not be enough to lose the status, agree, but it's not totally irrelevant either. Don't forget, it's about 100'000$, even though it's a game, it's not peanuts. And they are hurting other, honourable 501(c)(3)s.

And one more point, in many cases you don't need to win, it can be enough to scare them. They probably have enough lawyers among their supporters, so that might not be very easy, but also negative publicity is something they might want to avoid. Don't give up before even exploring the possibilities. Now i have to make a phone call and i am overloaded anyway, so i hope somebody other than me can take care of this.

 

[No Poster Girl]

During the Chase contest, I spoke to a friend who is a prominent lawyer and posed precisely the question you asked.

 

[eric_s]

Ok, good, but if you can, ask again in the context of the Vivint contest. I know in Chase it was not against the rules, but here it is. Also ask with regards to the 501(c)(3) status, please. Even if it's not enough to have the status withdrawn, if we complain, it will be filed there, and if there are future complaints from future contests, at some points it might be enough. Also the organisation might not be happy about one chapter getting in trouble and potentially losing that status. And please somebody forward this to the WPI.

What is the other option? We have already told Vivint and can insist more if they don't seem to do anything about it. And we can make more noise on their pages. But then that's it.
Even if we don't know if we can do something about it legally, i would not just give up without trying it and let them win and take the prize by cheating.

 

[No Poster Girl]

With all due respect, eric_s, I believe the best place to put our energies here, once we've supplied the info we've found to Vivint, is in getting more votes for WPI. During Chase, I personally messaged my 350+ facebook friends individually and netted 150+ votes.

When the compensation for votes in Chase first appeared, I contacted the schools b/c I assumed what was happening was that a supporter was offering the rewards rather than the schools. When it became clear that the compensation was endorsed by the schools, I stopped doing that.

I spent a week doing exhaustive research to link the schools to the effort - learning about the organization, reading past news coverage, gathering the names of all the people involved with the leadership of the schools, scraping dozens of facebook profiles for friends lists, creating a spreadsheet that cross-referenced the people involved and thus proved their interrelations. I sent all the information to Chase. They did nothing.

I wrote the blog series that I linked above and got an enormous amount of traffic.

I started a facebook page for people outraged by the cheating.

I contacted all the local news stations and the newspapers in the markets in which each of the five schools were located, and a number of national or web journalists as well. There was little interest - the person at the NYT basically told me that these contests are so fraught that cheating was really no longer newsworthy.

I am bedridden, and all of this was a tremendous outlay of energy. I am willing to assemble the information, send it to Vivint and publish it on my blog, but the stuff that didn't help I'm not really willing to set myself back yet again by doing. If you would like to do so and would like to have people file complaints, please let us know where you discover the best place to do that would be.

Once again, this is not something that Chabad is going to crack down on. The people who were running the cheating effort in the Chase contest were prominent members of that community. And the same rabbi is heading up the effort here.

 

[eric_s]

Ok, N.P.Girl, and thanks for your work. Unfortunately, i am also not very well at the moment and have too many commitments. I agree with you that it's very important to try to win new voters. I'm still a bit scared though that a honest charity might not be able to beat a cheating one in this way. But that does not mean we should not do anything we can to get more votes, of course. It's unbelievable a rabbi would be participating in these practices here...

 

[eric_s]

If they were to continue to cheat and we would not find a way to stop them or to get more votes than them (that's not what i'm expecting!), then the best thing that could happen to us would be that they get to overall number 1. Then the second charity in the Pacific region would get the 100'000$, as far as i know.

 

[shannah]

I see Vivint has removed previous postings about voting concerns from their page. Is someone with the new details going to be contacting them again or posting again on their page?

 

[No Poster Girl]

Helen's post is still there. It's just further down the page. You'd have to click "older posts" to see it.

Helen is going to post on the Vivint page. I am assembling screenshots and links for an email to Vivint and a post on my blog.