Cheaters and UB and Phil...oh my!

[LLAMA]

Recently, I entered a contest at billvsphil.com(a promotion held by UB) where the winner of the best video impersonation(as voted on by internet viewers) would win a trip out to Vegas to get treated like a VIP for a few days and for a meet and greet with Phil Hellmuth and also get to play some poker with him. Some might not think it's a big deal, but with work and family, I haven't had a chance to go on a vacation for about 10 years now. Also have been promising the wife that we would go to Vegas for our honeymoon for several years now. Besides the fact that I respect Phil's game a great deal and would really enjoy meeting him and picking his brain.

I figured i'd have a little fun(perhaps too much fun...wig, bra, high voice...what could be funner?) with it and give it a try. I did an impersonation of Annie Duke winning her first WSOP bracelet and submitted it. When I saw that only 5 videos were submitted in total by the deadline and that I had a 20% chance to win right off the bat, I thought my chances were great!

The rules were simple...1 vote per PC was all that was supposed to be allowed.

I tried to check the voting standings as often as I could in the beginning. I watched several times as the top 2 vote-getters would get hundreds of votes in spurts...sometimes they would all come within minutes(2-3 per as quick as I could hit refresh) and other times they would get their hundreds over a couple hours(slow and steady at like 2-3 per minute). The other 3 of us got like 2-3 per hour if we were lucky...coincidentally the same as the top 2 during the other 20 or so hours a day these spurts weren't going on.

This led me to start investigating on how to bypass the 1 vote per PC that was supposed to be in place, as there was no way that many votes could have happened that quick by individual PCs. Finally, after a series of testing, I figured out that you could block the cookie from being placed and just keep hitting refresh and it would rack up the vote count very quickly. Obviously, that's what these guys had been doing.

While I could have used all this information to do the same things as these other guys and just have an all-out clicking war like they were doing, I am not a cheater. I wouldn't want to dishonestly win something that I did not deserve because I found a flaw and exploited it. These guys have made it obvious that they did it with malicious intent and flat-out blatantly cheated in order to win. I knew I had to let someone know what was going on here.

I tried contacting someone involved with this promotion through UB support, but after 3 weeks now and several emails(some with URGENT and ATTN: EMMA in the subject line as suggested), I never received a response back from them other then "Thank you for contacting us. We have forwarded your message to the appropriate department. Feel free to contact us if you require further assistance" a few times. I finally got ahold of a guy through YouTube's(site where the videos were uploaded to) messaging service that worked at Loudvision Marketing(agency that provides marketing to UB) and he gave me his direct email address at Loudvision. I sent him the same message I sent to UB support and he ended up calling me on the phone that night. He ADMITTED that there was a mistake in the script that they did not catch during in-house testing that allowed more then 1 vote per PC using this exploit(which could have prevented if someone from UB got back to me when I had tried contacting them several times in the 2 weeks prior). He also ADMITTED that DIGITALWAFFLE(winner of the contest) and HULL16 had indeed cheated and racked up their own vote count. In the end, by looking at the billvsphil.com site right now, it looks as if DIGITALWAFFLE had given himself over 1200 votes and HULL16 had given himself over 1500 votes...and that's only the ones they got caught on as the guy said he was writing a script to remove any votes within 10 seconds of each other. So, all the slow and steady ones they did over a couple hours all stuck.

I do not understand how these guys could so blatantly cheat and yet still be allowed to win. Would UB allow a cheater on their site? Would Phil Hellmuth allow a cheater to play in a poker game with him(well, I guess he will be tonight, beings the winner will be doing just that)? Would you? I would think the answers to be a very straight-forward NO. Hell, not only would cheating not be allowed, but most times you'd get banned/ass kicked for it.

I feel like a 2 outter just knocked me out of a tournament. I feel very wronged and am disgusted about the outcome of this contest as should the other 2 guys that submitted an entry. I really want opinions on who is at fault here. Is it myself for being stupid enough to have morals and should have just clicked myself into the win? Is it UB for not caring enough to look into this and allowing cheating? Is it the idiot marketing agency that doesn't know how to correctly run a promotion?

I have emails into UB support(first one sent like 3+ weeks ago now) and to Phil Hellmuth and Phil Hellmuth's poker agent, Brian Balsbaugh(sent about a week ago). Not one has responded. Understandably, Phil probably hasn't even looked at an email since the WSOP began, but I thought UB had more integrity then this.