Bots gamed the T-Mobile Tuesdays contest, but that's not why you didn't win the Tesla
Small-town Pennsylvania is home of iron and steel mills, covered bridges, pretzel bakeries and... disproportionate wins of the T-Mobile Tuesdays freebie throwing contest. T-Mobile is famous for carrying out these weekly giveaways where you can win anything from free pizza to annual subscriptions and vacations.
A brilliant marketing endeavor T-Mobile Tuesdays are open to the carrier's subscribers, and recently Sprint customers were folded into the big Tuesdays family after T-Mobile merged with the yellow carrier.
Unfortunately, the odds are stacked in favor of the citizens of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, it turns out, as nearly a third of winners in a recent Tuesdays giveaway session were from that small town. Since the inception of the program, there have been 24 winners from Chadds Ford, population 3700, but only four from, say, New York.
The bots winning T-Mobile Tuesdays contest
How come? Well, yes, bots, lots and lots of bots. According to CNBC reports, "the high number of Chadds Ford winners was related to bots submitting multiple entries." The scam artist or artists from the town used tools to quickly fill multiple entry forms with a Chadds Ford address, and thus raise their odds of winning instead of relying on a single entry.
T-Mobile says that it has addressed the problem, and its Tuesdays form-filling is more fraud-proof now, but who were the culprits and how exactly did it fix the issue so that it does not reappear in the future, remains to be heard.
Oh, well, if you didn't win that Tesla, at least you now know it's not because the universe has stacked up against you. We kid, the Chadds Ford entries won peanuts in comparison, but it's still annoying.
The @Tesla Model 3 can travel more than 250 miles on a full charge ️ This week, enter to win 1 of 3 Teslas!
— T-Mobile (@TMobile) July 14, 2020
To enter, tell us where you'd take yours using #TMobileTuesdays + #contest
: https://t.co/RCGoiX8KA1pic.twitter.com/ANsryXl9cy
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