How to buy votes without getting caught

The five factors

Across eight years of operation and more than 100,000 orders, we have catalogued every detection event we have heard about and reverse-engineered the cause. The list collapses to five factors. Skip any one and detection risk rises sharply. Get all five right and detection becomes the rare exception.

1. Residential IP diversity

The single most important factor. The first thing an auditor checks is whether votes share an IP origin. Bought votes from a data-centre subnet are obvious in minutes. Votes from a thousand distinct residential ISPs, each with its own ASN and geolocation, look indistinguishable from organic visitors.

What to demand: residential IPs only, no data-centre or known proxy ranges, distinct addresses per vote. We deliver from residential pools across all 20 supported markets.

2. Human-realistic timing

The single biggest tell of an amateur vote service. Real visitors do not vote in 30-minute bursts at 03:00 UTC. They arrive distributed across the contest window, weighted to local business hours, with a believable lull at night.

What to demand: ability to specify a delivery window, and a service that respects it rather than dumping everything fast. Our default pacing matches the contest length unless you request faster.

3. Accounts with history

Relevant for platform-login votes (Facebook, Instagram, X). The voting account is visible to the platform’s audit systems. A vote from a brand-new blank profile with no photos and no friends is a free signal. A vote from a multi-year-old profile with normal activity is invisible.

What to demand: aged accounts with realistic activity. Our pool is curated, not minted on-demand. For non-login votes (independent contest sites with email or CAPTCHA verification), this factor does not apply.

4. Geographic distribution

Many contests declare eligibility by country ("US residents only", "open to EU residents"). Votes arriving from outside that geography are an instant signal. Country-matched delivery is critical here.

What to demand: explicit country targeting at order time. We support all 20 markets corresponding to our locale set — see /faq/can-i-buy-votes-from-specific-country/.

5. CAPTCHA solving

Independent contest microsites often gate votes behind reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, or Cloudflare Turnstile. Bots that try to bypass without solving leave a trail of failed challenge requests that the organiser can pattern-match. Real CAPTCHA-solving infrastructure leaves no such trail.

What to demand: a service with explicit CAPTCHA-solving capability rather than blind bot retries. See /buy-captcha-votes/ for our coverage of this category.

What you can do on your side

The five factors above are on the service. There are three additional moves that materially reduce your risk:

1. Generate at least some organic share velocity. Post your entry to your own feed and ask three or four friends to share. A vote count that is wildly out of step with comments and shares is the second most common audit trigger.
2. Do not announce your purchase. Competitor reports are the leading external trigger for organiser audits. A losing competitor who suspects (or gets evidence) and reports you is more dangerous than the organiser’s own monitoring.
3. Order proportional to the leader, not 10x more. If the current leader has 800 votes and you arrive at 8,000, the audit is automatic. If you arrive at 1,400 it looks competitive.

The worst case checklist

What guarantees detection:

• Cheap data-centre IP service.
• All votes delivered in the final hour.
• No country targeting on a geography-locked contest.
• 10x more votes than the leader with zero organic engagement.
• You publicly post that you bought votes.
• Fresh blank platform accounts where the contest requires login.

Every one of those is avoidable.

Related FAQs

• Will the organiser detect bought votes?
• Which service is safest?
• Can I buy from a specific country?
• Refund if disqualified

Place an order that ticks all five factors: Place an order

See also: IP votes · CAPTCHA votes · Residential IP glossary · About the founder