To start with, a bit of context
A few years ago, United Heroes worked exclusively with activity trackers: sports watches or apps that track sports activities or step counts, particularly using smartphones. While this system had the advantage of limiting the risk of cheating, it had two major drawbacks:
the number of "trackable" activities was very limited
and you needed a connected device or at least a smartphone, which only counted steps.
In order to make United Heroes much more inclusive and turn it into a comprehensive sports and well-being program, we decided to allow manual activity logging, thereby adding more than 70 activity types to the program.
This decision was widely welcomed by our clients, as well as by all users who were able to log gentle activities, DIY activities, as well as parasports activities, and fully enjoy all United Heroes features.
However, it also enabled some users to misuse it by manually adding fake activities to earn more points. This behavior, though very rare, is visible, and creates frustration for our members who motivate themselves to move a bit more every day.
In order to limit cheating, we have set up automatic alerts to identify the users concerned, and we now send them messages to deter them.
In cases of proven and ongoing cheating, our last resort is to suspend the user's account.
The alerts are based on:
thresholds – speed and distance limits per activity type
and activity frequencies logged manually (not recorded by sports trackers).
We know that some people train extensively, so our approach is positive, aimed at better understanding their habits. However, in the absence of plausible explanations, the user is warned several times prior to suspension.
This system is not foolproof, of course, but the initial tests we carried out are very encouraging and the results are effective.
We have deployed it since 15th February 2022 for all our users.
Of course, if you have any questions, comments, or recommendations, we would be delighted to discuss them with you.