Hello!
Perhaps, today's post could be entitled "We wanted the better, but it turned out as always". And this story is about our beloved cheaters :)
Having launched TrueFlip, we wanted to make our promotion viral and at the same time offer people the opportunity to get hands on our product. To perform this, our team members went Dutch in forming TrueFlip's first Jackpot – 10 BTC. Simultaneously we launched a small advertising campaign through webmasters and CPA-networks. As a part of this, we offered a free ticket to every new user. This provided us some insignificant traffic of about 2000-3000 people, so we decided to add a referral program - to give users the opportunity of inviting their friends to TrueFlip and get free tickets for it. If it worked in Uber, then why not try it, we thought. Then it all started.
In the first three days everything was quiet, and we even got a little upset that our resources were diverted to such nonsense. On the third day TrueFlip's web-page had noticeably slowed down. We turned to Google Analytics - and thought that this wonderful software environment was mistaken about TrueFlip's account. Google showed that the site was crowded with 1000-1500 users in a moment. Simultaneously, Carl! A brand new project's site, Carl! Soon the site collapsed. Remember, we claimed that we work 16 hours a day? That day we worked 24 hours. We upgraded the server, increased its throughput, made improvements to the code, optimized hashing. The next day, our site was visited by 60 thousand unique users. Everything looked just fine, as it seemed to us then. Except our Jackpot of 10 BTC, which was spent totally on the same day. When you are told there's no way you can win a lottery, do not believe it. Yes way! At a minimum, if you buy a lot of tickets. We said buy it? In our case, it was about free tickets :)
Left without Jackpot, we tried to figure out what was happening. Nothing special. Just a random guy in Indonesia wrote a harmless post on Facebook and others followed on writing that TrueFlip gives bitcoins for free. In such a primitive way, people received their free tickets for every careless lover of easy profit that followed their links. And it was not the worst. Special robots appeared on sale at hacker forums, as well as hundreds of fake accounts in social networks and fictive emails.
And the war began. The big war with the cheaters, which made us stronger, more experienced and convinced that we can take control of any issue. And gave us the knowledge that we certainly are not stupider than these petty thieves.
In the next post we'll tell you how we managed to finally defeat the army of cheaters, got our 10 BTC back and how our experience in developing antifraud systems helped us.
Stay tuned!
Yours,
TrueFlip Team