Almost every week, T-Mobile Tuesdays runs a contest alongside its deals that give away prizes like trips to Premio Lo Nuestro in Miami, a road trip prize package, and over $1 million in Amazon gift cards. Recently, though, the winners of some of these prizes have raised some suspicion.

A disproportionate number of T-Mobile Tuesdays contest winners have been located in Chadds Ford, PA. Despite the town only having around 3,700 residents, 16 people from Chadds Ford won gift cards during T-Mo’s May 12 contest.

Another gift card contest on March 31 saw another eight winners from the small town.

This high number of winners from Chadds Ford recently caught the eye of some folks on Reddit, and now T-Mobile has confirmed to CNBC that the high number of winners from Chadds Ford was caused by bots submitting multiple entries.

T-Mo says that it’s implemented additional safety measures to help prevent the bots from winning in the future and that it’ll continue to keep an eye on the issue.

While T-Mobile didn’t go into the issue any further, Jonathan Tomek of threat intelligence firm WhiteOps explained that the automated system like the one T-Mo uses for T-Mobile Tuesdays can make it easier for someone to win prizes using a bot because the winners likely aren’t being reviewed by a real person. With T-Mobile Tuesdays, the winners won digital gift cards through an automated system that let the winners get their prize instantly using a redeemable code.

Bots are popular options for things like limited sneaker releases because they can quickly and easily fill out entry fields. It seems that someone used bots to repeatedly enter T-Mobile Tuesdays contests for gift cards, but they used Chadds Ford, PA for their location for most or all of their entries rather than changing the location regularly.

The news that bots have won many of the T-Mobile Tuesday prizes in past contests is frustrating because it means that someone was winning multiple gift cards and taking them away from others who entered the contest legitimately. Now that T-Mobile has been made aware of the issue, hopefully we’ll we won’t see a disproportionate number of winners located in Chadds Ford in future T-Mobile Tuesdays gift card contests.

Thanks Brenden!

Source: CNBC