For a start, a bit of context

A few years ago, United Heroes worked exclusively with activity trackers: sports watches or applications that track sports activities or even step tracking, in particular thanks to smartphones. This system had the merit of limiting the risk of cheating but had two major flaws:

• the number of “trackable” activities was very limited
• and it was necessary to have a connected device or at least a smartphone but which only counts steps.

In order to make United Heroes much more inclusive and make it a global sports and well-being program, we have decided to accept the addition of manual activities and thus add more than 70 types of activities to the program.

This decision was widely welcomed by our customers but also by all users who were able to add soft activities, DIY activities but also disabled sports activities and thus take full advantage of all the features of United Heroes.

On the other hand, it allowed users to abuse it by manually adding fake activities to earn more points. This behavior, very marginal but visible, generates frustration for our members who motivate themselves to move a little more every day.

In the event of proven and ongoing cheating, our last resort is to suspend the user's account.

The alerts are based on thresholds and manually reported activity frequencies (not recorded by sports trackers). We know that there are people who train a lot so our approach is positive in order to better understand their practice. On the other hand, in the absence of plausible explanations, the user is warned several times before the suspension. 

This system is obviously not infallible, but the first tests we have carried out are very encouraging and the results are effective.

Of course, if you have any questions, comments or recommendations, we would be happy to discuss them with you.