Online contests are an effective tool for engaging large audiences and collecting their data. However, promoting valuable prizes can also attract unwanted entries, bots and cheaters. In this article, find out how Qualifio gives you full control over your online contests and helps you prevent cheating:

  • Set contest rules that prevent misuse
  • Limit individual and collective participation
  • Block IP addresses, email domains and countries
  • Protect contest access with codes and age gates
  • Verify identities via email, SSO and data validation
  • Keep bots out with CAPTCHA
  • Manage prizes fairly with a winner selection tool
  • Prevent quiz cheating with randomised questions

The result: cleaner data, fairer contests and better marketing ROI.

Why prevent cheating in your online contests

Online contests are among the most effective tools for brands to collect first- and zero-party data. When audiences take part in interactive experiences (quizzes, photo contests, digital games) paired with the incentive of a prize, they’re more willing to share personal information in exchange for a chance to win 🎁

For marketers, this data is invaluable, helping them personalise communications, generate deeper engagement and strengthen the relationship between each participant and the brand.

However, while popular contests with juicy prizes often attract many participants, they’re also likely to draw unwanted entries. You may encounter:

  • Users who try to cheat your online contest
  • Bots clogging your CRM with fake entries
  • Cheeky participants who attempt to claim more prizes than permitted

These irregular entries make it harder to identify the real participants of your contests, select winners fairly, and ensure that your prizes end up in the hands of people you actually want to reward 🥲

With Qualifio, creating online contests is easy thanks to our catalogue of 50+ interactive marketing formats. The platform also gives you the tools you need to prevent cheating and stay in full control of your contest from start to finish.

Set your contest’s rules

A secure contest starts with clear, solid rules. Your contest rules define who can participate, how long the contest lasts, what prizes are available, and the conditions for winning. They set the boundaries that help you filter out ineligible participants and reduce complaints.

On Qualifio, you can write custom rules for each contest, or save your rules as a template to reuse across multiple contests whenever you need to enforce the same participation criteria.

💡 You can also include a checkbox requiring users to confirm that they have read and understood your contest rules. This step is simple, but it reinforces transparency and gives you an additional layer of protection against fraudulent or non-compliant participation.

Control participation in your contest

To keep your online contests fair and protected from unwanted entries, controlling who can participate and how often is essential. Qualifio provides you with several tools to fine-tune participation conditions, allowing you to stay in control of your contests, from participation caps to country restrictions and age gates.

Participation limits

Participation limits help you manage traffic, reduce fraud attempts and protect your prizes from being taken by bots or cheating participants ⛔️

👤 Individual participation limits

Set the maximum number of times a single person can participate in your contest. You can limit entries:

  • For the entire duration of the contest
  • Within a specific timeframe (e.g., the limit resets 1 day after the first participation)
  • Based on a frequency (e.g., participants can enter the contest twice a day)

These limits work by identifying participants through their email address, phone number or IP address, so make sure to collect them with a form!

👥 Collective participation limits

You can also cap the total number of participations allowed for your whole audience. For example:

  • 500 daily participations until a total of 10,000 is reached
  • A limit of 10,000 entries from the moment the contest starts

This helps you stay in control when managing large prize pools or product samples, preventing cheaters and opportunistic users from overwhelming your campaign.

💡Did you know you can create custom participation limits with secure tokens? These tokens allow Qualifio to receive information from an external source, confirming whether a user meets specific requirements (being a subscriber, having spent €50 in your shop, etc.). Only participants who meet these predefined conditions will be able to enter the contest.

Blocking IP addresses and domain names

Qualifio automatically collects the IP address of every participant. If you ever detect suspicious behaviour from a participant, such as automated entries, you can block their IP address for all your campaigns.

These blocked users will still be able to access your contests, but their entries will not be taken into account or appear in your statistics, preventing any cheating attempts.

You can also block entire email domain names following the same logic, preventing entries that come from disposable or suspicious domain providers 😇

💡 Did you know you can restrict participation only to users from certain countries? With Qualifio’s IP-based geo-blocking feature (part of the Campaign Shield add-on), you can allow participants into your contest when their IP address shows they’re based in one of your target countries.

This is especially helpful to stop users from participating twice via VPN or attempting to enter the contest from regions not included in your prize strategy.

Ask for a code to access your contest

Adding a code gate also helps prevent unauthorised or fraudulent entries 🔢

🎟️ Unique codes

Upload a list of unique codes to your contest and share them with your audience: via email, product packaging, receipts or any channel you prefer.

Participants must enter one of these codes before accessing the contest, proving they have completed a required step (such as buying a product) rather than trying to win prizes without following the intended journey.

🚪 Access codes

Alternatively, you can protect your contest with a single access code. Any participant must provide this combination before entering, ensuring that only the audience you choose can access the experience.

Put an age gate in place

If your contest is not intended for underage users or if you simply prefer not to collect data from them, you can enable an age gate for your contest. When participants disclose their age, and it falls below the legal threshold in their country (based on their IP address), Qualifio blocks their participation automatically.

This helps you stay compliant, avoid data collection from minors and prevent users from misrepresenting themselves to access prizes.

Verify participant identity

Verifying participant identity isn’t just essential for preventing cheaters and bots from entering your online contests; it also helps you maintain a clean, accurate audience database. A database filled with fake or low-quality profiles hurts your marketing performance and your ROI. Qualifio offers several tools to ensure that only real, qualified participants enter your contests.

Email address verification

Email verification helps reduce spam entries and fake accounts by ensuring that each participation comes from a real, reachable email address 💌

After submitting their email and other information through your contest form, participants receive a confirmation email. Their entry only becomes valid once they click on a confirmation link.

You can choose how strict you want this process to be:

  • Send a single confirmation email per email address
  • Or require a confirmation every time that address is used

Single sign-on (SSO)

If your brand has a website or digital customer area where users log in, Qualifio allows you to use single sign-on (SSO) to gate your contest. This means participants must authenticate with their existing credentials before entering 🫡

Because only registered users can participate, SSO discourages anonymous entries and makes it harder for cheaters and bots to slip through.

💡 SSO is especially valuable in user-generated content contests (photo, video or writing contests) where identity matters. Authentication discourages users from creating multiple accounts to vote for themselves or manipulate results.

Data validation in forms

Validating data collected through forms helps reduce spam submissions and ensures participants provide accurate, usable information.

Qualifio’s Data Validation add-on checks:

  • Phone numbers: standardises format and verifies reachability
  • Email addresses: suggests valid domains and confirms they exist
  • Postal addresses: suggests complete addresses, standardises format and confirms they exist

By prompting users to correct mistakes, this tool reduces invalid data and improves delivery success, which is especially important when shipping prizes. Imagine selecting winners only to find their postal addresses were not entered correctly! 😱

Keep bots at bay with CAPTCHA

Bots can easily flood your contest with fake entries, skew your results and steal prizes meant for your real audience 🤖 By integrating your preferred CAPTCHA tool with Qualifio, you can add a security layer that makes automated entries much harder.

Using CAPTCHA not only protects your prizes; it also prevents your database from filling up with fake profiles, helping maximise data quality and marketing ROI.

💡 You can integrate your preferred CAPTCHA tool into your Qualifio campaigns through the Campaign Shield add-on. This add-on also includes IP-based geo-blocking to restrict participation by country, keeping your contest even safer from unwanted entries.

Manage your contest’s winners and prizes

Online contests can offer a wide variety of prizes, from mass giveaways of product samples to single, high-value rewards like overseas trips 🏝️ Managing both prizes and winners ensures you never give away more than you have, and that winners are chosen fairly according to your contest rules.

Prize winning limits

You might want participants to engage with your contest multiple times without letting them win more than once. 

Qualifio lets you limit each participant to winning a single prize using their email or phone number in instant win formats. Participants can still take part multiple times, but they won’t be able to win additional prizes, helping you protect your budget and avoid abuse.

Pick your winners and assign prizes

When participants complete your contest and submit their information, Qualifio automatically records their participation. Once your contest ends, you can use Qualifio’s winner management tool to pick winners and assign prizes without manually filtering through large datasets. This tool allows you to:

  • Select several winners for your contest
  • Exclude participants who have already won previously
  • Filter participants by score, time of participation, or answers to questions
  • Draw winners based on specific answers to questions
  • Assign prizes either randomly or manually

Select winners in instant win formats

Instant win formats, like jackpots and wheels of fortune, allow participants to immediately find out if they’ve won, without having to wait, as it happens with other contests 🙌 On Qualifio, you can upload prizes (types, images, units), assign them to your contest and control how they’re distributed using two main methods:

🍀 Probability

Set the chance of winning for each participant (e.g., 10%). For contests with multiple prize types, you can assign different probabilities per prize. Once all prizes are claimed, the chance of winning a prize in your contest drops to zero.

💡 If you’re giving away unlimited prizes like discount vouchers, you can set the probability of winning to 100% so that everyone wins.

🗓️ Calendar

Distribute prizes according to a schedule:

  • Randomly: spread prizes evenly over a timeframe (e.g., 100 prizes over 50 days; 2 prizes per day)
  • Manually: assign specific prizes to specific days (e.g., a 40-day contest with 60 prizes in the first 20 days and 10 prizes in the last 20)

💡 You can also define the time range during the day when prizes will be awarded. When the period starts, the first eligible participant automatically receives the prize.

Cheating in quizzes: bonus tip

In quiz-based contests, randomising the order of questions can help prevent cheaters from using automation tools to submit the same answers with different credentials repeatedly.

You can also display a random subset of questions each time, drawn from a larger question pool, making it much harder to cheat on your quiz contests.

Whether you’re running exclusive contests with a few expensive prizes and need strict controls to protect fairness, or large-scale campaigns with thousands of economical prizes or product samples that require tight participation management, Qualifio gives you the tools to prevent cheating and take control of your online contests.

New to online contests? With Qualifio, you can create your own contests with a variety of formats and use them to engage your audience and collect their first- and zero-party data. Get in touch and discover what Qualifio can do for your brand! 👇

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