How a high-growth contest company used Fingerprint to prevent fraudulent entries into online contests

About the company

The company is a fan engagement platform that connects brands to fans with contests, sweepstakes, and other games.

The challenge

A big issue when running contests, whether online or in person, is individuals attempting to game the system by entering multiple times to increase their chances of winning. As a result, the company needs to ensure its contestants know they are signing up for contests with a real chance of winning.

Why Fingerprint

The company discovered Fingerprint after browsing the NPM (Node Package Manager) registry and decided to try the open-source version. Almost immediately, they transitioned to the paid version, Fingerprint Pro, given its higher device identification accuracy.

"We recommend Fingerprint to businesses that need to uniquely identify their users, especially where other ID methods are unacceptably cumbersome."

Quick POC (Proof-of-concept) and implementation

The company was able to quickly test the accuracy of Fingerprint after implementation. They ran a proof of concept test by challenging employees to attempt to enter a contest multiple times, which they could not. After this small-scale test, the company felt comfortable implementing Fingerprint in their product and continued testing with real users.

Room for growth

As fraud prevention tactics grow more commonplace, fraudsters will iterate and introduce new methods of fraudulent activity. The company quickly understood the limitations of using browser fingerprinting alone as a method of identification and plans to take advantage of Fingerprint's advanced signals to understand their fraudulent traffic better.

Ease of Use

The company needed an easy tool to set up as a high-growth startup. Given the ease of use and implementation, only one engineer is responsible for the entirety of Fingerprint's usage at the company.

Key takeaways

With Fingerprint, the company enhanced the fairness of its contests, preventing repeat entries and ensuring participants have a genuine chance to win. The high accuracy and straightforward setup of Fingerprint enabled rapid implementation and effective fraud prevention, managed by a single engineer. As fraud tactics evolve, the company is well-equipped to adapt, using Fingerprint's advanced features to maintain secure and reliable contests as they scale.