Fishing contest snared in cheat claims and barbed comments
A FISHING competition has become embroiled in a bitter and increasingly personal row about allegations of vote rigging, fraud and bullying, forcing organisers to urge angry anglers to “treat each other with respect”.
Angling Direct, a Norfolk-based fishing tackle company, holds an annual competition called “King of the Catch”, for which more than 1,500 anglers submit photographs to its website of themselves holding a prized catch.
The entrants encourage friends and family to vote for them online, resulting in about 17,000 votes cast every year. The four winners with the most votes in four separate categories are then awarded a “once in a lifetime” fishing holiday in Canada or Thailand.
Shortly after opening in July, Angling Direct stripped some entrants of hundreds of votes amid claims many had been cast fraudulently. Angling Direct issued a statement saying the “scale and levels of sophisticated counterfeit votes is … jeopardising the competition” which was “becoming increasingly difficult to police”. The company said it had found proof that “bots” – automated software programmes – had been unfairly logging votes. Contestants were enraged voting on some photographs had been suspended and points docked.
Chelsie Aldridge, a 20-year-old law student from Bromley, Kent, submitted a picture of her holding a 29lb catfish. “The purpose of the competition is to get as many votes as possible – I had 1,200 and was in first place,” she said. “But one morning I had an email from Angling Direct saying they had removed 600 because they were convinced they had been placed by bots. It was totally disheartening. I had no idea what a ‘bot’ was.” She then became a victim of offensive online abuse, but remains in the contest, which ends on Sept 30.
Nathun Perry withdrew Bradley, his 13-year-old son, after a photograph of him holding a carp moved into first place, but then had votes removed by the company. He said: “I was disgusted with the way my son had been treated.”
A spokesman for Angling Direct said there was no suggestion that any contestants had been cheating, adding that it was reviewing the way the competition would be judged in the future.
“It is disappointing that some entries have been affected by sophisticated efforts to manipulate the voting system,” he said. “We have been made aware of the online arguments that the voting issue is provoking and we ask that all competition participants treat each other with respect.”