Award Force: “With DataDome, most of our problems just disappeared.”

Award Force launched in 2013 in response to market demand for a better way to manage awards. While the company originates from Australia, its friendly, dedicated, international team is now in 18 countries across the globe.

The Challenges: Fake Accounts, Voting Fraud, and Spam

“Bots are everywhere, and we became aware of them early on,” commented Kirk Bushell, Technical Director at Award Force.

“Almost as soon as we launched our solution, the trouble started. For example, one of our very first clients saw almost 200,000 fake accounts signing up for their program within the space of a couple of weeks.”

Bots attack the Award Force platform in a variety of different ways, usually involving fraudulent data creation.

“Programs with a strong marketing presence tend to get a lot of spam attempts,” Kirk explains. “These bots might be trying to post unwanted advertisements or backlinks, but sometimes it’s simply vandalism.”

“Contests and award programs that use a guest voting process, on the other hand, are more vulnerable to people using bots to try and game the system and influence the outcome. Typically, this involves creating fake accounts and using them for fake submissions or fraudulent voting. The type of threat really depends on the nature of the program that we’re supporting.“

Initially, Award Force managed this unwanted traffic with a combination of an IP block list, a honeypot mechanism, and a CAPTCHA for registrations. For a while, this enabled the team to fend off most of the unwanted traffic, but as bots got increasingly smarter it was proving less and less effective.

So when their CAPTCHA provider changed its business model and multiplied the annual subscription fee by orders of magnitude, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Kirk and his team sat down to find a more sustainable solution to the bot problem, and that’s when they came across DataDome.

The Solution: Cost-Effective Bot Protection With Shared Intelligence

“There’s actually a lot of fun to be had in checking out the market and finding out what’s available, and in testing what will work and what won’t,” Kirk smiles. “We ultimately concluded that what we needed was some sort of middleware layer that checks and validates the requests before they get to us, and we drilled it down to DataDome and one other provider.”

The competing solution turned out to be prohibitively expensive, and the team decided to move ahead with DataDome.

“We were happy to find a cost-effective solution to our challenge, and the onboarding process was very straightforward. When we activated the protection after testing for about a month, our bad bot traffic was getting blocked from day one,” Kirk recalls.

“This was in DataDome’s early days, so in the initial phase we actually helped identify certain threats and improve the algorithm as well. It was a very interesting learning experience.”

Today, the DataDome solution protects enterprise online businesses across the world, which all benefit from real-time bot detection capabilities and shared intelligence across the entire pool. When a new threat is detected on one customer site, all DataDome users are automatically protected against it in less than 50 milliseconds.

The Result: No More Fraudulent Data Creation

“Our top priority was to prevent the creation of fake accounts,” Kirk explains. “Many of the programs we supported were plagued with these accounts, and the issue was a massive drain on our client success team. It frustrated our clients, it frustrated us, and we just spent way too much time dealing with it.”

When the DataDome solution started to block all attempts at fake account creation, it was a big win for Award Force. But the team soon realized that the solution was delivering great results in other areas as well.

“Our initial configuration wasn’t completely optimized. Certain bots were still getting through, and we couldn’t figure out why. But with the DataDome support team’s help, we sorted it out. And then we noticed that most of our problems just sort of disappeared,” Kirk recalls. “We were like, ‘hey, we’re actually getting quite a bit of value here’, which was great.”

To conclude, what would he say is the project’s most important success metric?

“It just works, and we don’t have to think about bad bot traffic anymore,” Kirk observes. “Bot issues no longer frustrate our customers, so they’re no longer a problem for the client success team, which means that they don’t have to ask my engineering team for help with it either. And that makes everybody happy!”

Learn more: How to detect and prevent fake account creation on your websites and apps.