About PickSafely

If you know someone who has worked, however briefly, in marketing then you know someone who has been part of a rigged giveaway. Selecting a friend or family member as the winner. Or putting a bowl out to collect business cards for a giveaway that never actually happens. This practice is ubiquitous in the marketing world and everyone seems to know it but there is a reluctance to do anything about it.

For starters, the people who run the giveaway (select the winner) are often at the lower levels of their department tasked with the menial job of collecting and scrubbing the email list (what the company wants out of the giveaway) and then casually selecting the winners. It is not hard to see how justifying such a practice may be. Particularly given their boss may empathize with their employees situation and the company as a whole would never want such a reality to come to light.

For if the fraud were discovered and leaked to news outlets, this would cause enormous reputational damage to the company and potential legal ramifications for the person who rigged the contest. Nevertheless if a routine audit were done cross referencing past winners with friends and family of the then marketing coordinator who selected the winners, we all know what would happen.

Utilizing third party marketers complicates matters worse. In the famous McDonalds Monopoly fraud case, people seem to forget that the McDonalds Company was the victim. Not the perpetrator. They had utilized the services of a third party marketing agency to facilitate and run the contest. These third party agencies have just as much incentive to rig such contests. As Don Draper stated so eloquently in Mad Men, the day you sign a client is the day you start losing clients.

Restricting friends and family from entry is often forbidden but the first thing one learns when they try to build out a social media presence is to ask friends and family first and foremost to follow them on social media.

As a bioethicist focused on ethical, transparent communication, I have long been concerned with fairness and integrity in digital interactions. When I noticed the widespread issue of rigged giveaways and the damage they cause to consumer trust, I felt compelled to create a solution.

PickSafely was born from a simple belief: transparency should not be optional. Every giveaway should be verifiable, every selection genuinely random, and every participant able to trust the integrity of the process.

By combining cryptographic randomization with permanent public verification, we have built a platform that makes it impossible to rig giveaways and easy to demonstrate their fairness—bringing transparency and trust back into promotional giveaways.