TL;DR:
If you or a loved one joined the Global Chat raffle on or after 2021/08/23, you may be entitled to coinancial compensation. https://bit.ly/raffle-analysis also has some new stuff if you're curious about which players tend to raffle together.
We've finally got something actually useful out of the Global Chat Raffle Analysis: a true crime story!
Our story begins on May 25, 2021, at 3:25 PM in Central Europe. On that day, a new player- nonolet (
https://www.warzone.com/Profile?p=68138926223), who'd joined only 5 weeks earlier on 04/19- got his first taste of the raffle. He joined and won his very first raffle, beating 5 other entrants to win 5 coins and a Supercharge Mine raffle.
Over the next 3 months, nonolet would go on to win 61 more raffles, earning 413 coins, 1 Fog Buster power, 19 Free Cache powers, 2 Inspire Mercenaries powers, 2 Market Raid powers, 9 Supercharge Army Camp powers, 7 Supercharge Mine powers, 11 Time Warp powers, and 5 poor artifacts- altogether, a combined value for $35.93 in raffle winnings. But this wasn't enough!
Enter the criminal instinct!On August 23, 2021, nearly 3 months after his first raffle, nonolet created his second shot- unoturbo, later #Uno, and now JennyA (
https://www.warzone.com/Profile?p=31141482252). Almost immediately, at 10:02 PM Central European time, unoturbo entered and, like nonolet's main, won its first raffle, beating 15 other entrants to gain 3 coins and a Free Cache power. Setting the stage for the future, nonolet also entered the same raffle on his main, nearly doubling his odds from 1/15 (6.7%) to 1/8 (12.5%).
Over the next month, 768 raffles would give away 5,576 coins and an additional 38,050 coins' worth in non-coin rewards.
During this time, exactly a quarter of raffles not only had nonolet enter but had nonolet enter on two accounts- tainting 1,615 worth of coins and another 9,360 worth of non-coin rewards. With his second chance, nonolet increased his expected winnings during these double-raffles by a whopping 73%- and he managed to win 476 coins and another 1960 in coin-equivalent value from non-coin rewards during this time. His double-raffle winnings wildly eclipsed what he got from playing fair- by a factor of 6.
nonolet couldn't help himself- he double-joined 192 raffles over the course of a month.
The VictimsBut for nonolet to gain better odds, someone had to pay... those 1,070 expected coin-equivalents gained from entering raffles twice came out of others' fair chances.
The bulk of them came from just 9 players- JK_3, krinid, awaythro, John Smith, Gunk, Kcebnroh, faxfox, Shin, and Lefty. The 4 "Raffle Kings" alone lost 306 expected coin-equivalents to nonolet's double-entries.
How to (almost) get away with raffle fraudWarzone, as many of you know, has its own alt detection system, which uses device fingerprinting (see
https://www.amiunique.org/fp) to detect accounts that play not only on the same network but on the same device. That's right- Warzone doesn't just keep track of
where you play from; they also try to track your device. So how, for all this time-
up to now, even (nonolet and JennyA still double-raffle, and John Smith's report against this cheating is still in review)- did he hide it?
It's simple: He plays from an iPhone! Apple phones have anti-fingerprinting measures that make them considerably harder to fingerprint than desktop-based Web browsers and other mobile devices, stumping Warzone's rudimentary device fingerprinting. Per an inside source, even today the system doesn't authoritatively flag nonolet and JennyA as the same person.
But he didn't cover his tracks...nonolet's fatal mistake? He didn't bother disguising his activity. Even today, JennyA and nonolet log on at roughly the same times. :O
Once he started double-raffling, he didn't control himself. When his second chance came onto the scene, nonolet joined the vast majority of his raffles on both accounts:
As a result, JennyA and nonolet had obviously the same activity pattern:
When the players noticed, it became
painfully obvious that nonolet and #Uno/unoturbo/JennyA are the same person.
When Jenny's active, nono's active. You can predict over 90% of JennyA's activity schedule just off of nono's. Line them up and it's almost hilarious:
Even playing in the same time zone doesn't come close to explaining this. I checked activity correlations between all frequent RaffleBot players in the dataset, combining #Uno and unoturbo (same account, different usernames, so they show up separately) into one "JennyA" entry. Unlike the earlier graph, I didn't restrict to only weeks when both accounts were active, so the correlations here are weaker.
The strongest correlations?
Players | r^2
-------------------------------|-----
JennyA and #Uno | 0.70
JennyA and unoturbo | 0.67
JennyA and nonolet | 0.61
That's right- the only comparison point for the nonolet & JennyA correlation are correlations between JennyA and JennyA under a different username. No other correlation even cracks 0.5. The strongest activity correlations between players are only between nonolet and his alts.
Once nonolet's activity raised red flags, it became obvious nonolet and JennyA are the same person playing from the same location, on the same network, likely using the same iOS device. riskboy88 even recorded him in the act (and cheating in an Idle Battle on top):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF6S_dPVqrQSome measure of justice...nonolet's report is still in the system and, if past handling of alt abuse is anything to go by, the most likely outcome is a warning (and that's if Warzone can overcome the apparent technological limitations in its device fingerprinting).
Meanwhile, at least 141 other players were impacted by nonolet's double-raffling (and that's only during the time period in the Global Chat Raffle Analysis dataset). What happens to them and their lost 1070 coin-equivalents?
For now, I've stepped up to the plate myself to thank nonolet and Warzone.com's rudimentary device fingerprinting for generating this level of entertainment value. It would cost 1,364 coins to make nonolet's victims whole, so I've only provided coin restitution to the 32 victims (excluding myself) who have lost over 1 expected coin to nonolet's raffle cheating. This restitution requires a much more modest sum of only 172 coins to enact.
Were you impacted? How much did you lose? You can find an incomplete list of the victims and their precise expected losses at
https://bit.ly/nonolet-victims.
Let us all thank nonolet for creating this level of entertainment value by stooping to alt-cheating on a Global Chat raffle, all to gain illicit winnings worth at most $19.60 in a month. Was it worth it?
In a poetic twist, nonolet's biggest victims are the two active moderators on Global Chat.
Edited 10/14/2021 02:37:14
