Last week I touched a bit on the Pepsi Refresh Grant. I mentioned that it was basically a contest where people vote, and the idea with the most votes, wins funding. Actually, to be more specific, the top 10 ideas in each category win funding.
So it’s a big popularity contest.
If you want to support an idea, you may vote online once per day, and via text once per day, for a total of 2 votes per person, per day.
M’kay. That is simple enough.
In a household like mine, with three people eligible to vote, that means we could vote 6 times a day for our favorite.
But wait…..have you heard of Power Votes?
On each Pepsi product, there was a single code. So, on a 20 ounce soda, you would get one Power Vote code. On the box of a 12 can pack, you would get 1 Power Vote code. On a 24 can case you would get one power vote code. You get the idea.
The Power Votes are pretty darn important because each person can enter up to 10 Power Votes per day. TEN. So in a household such as mine, that would be 30 additional votes per day.
But wait it gets better.
Each Power Code, when entered, was actually good for UP TO 100 VOTES. If you are keeping track here, that means that in my household, there was the potential for 3000 votes a day.
You read that right. Three Thousand a day. Or if you want to be all picky about it, 3006 votes per day. Over the 30 days voting took place, that is 90,180 possible votes.
But, that is assuming of course that a family was to purchase 30 Pepsi products a day in order to obtain the 30 codes needed to Power Vote.
That’s a lot of Pepsi.
Lea Kaydus, acting as an individual and not an organization, found a way around that pesky problem.
I am not sure exactly how she found a way around that problem, but she did. Like a miracle floating down from the sky, every single day during the active voting of the Pepsi Refresh grant, there were 30 Power Vote codes emailed to us.
Along with the magically appearing codes came the warning – You must use different computers to use each 10 votes. Each 10 votes must come from a different IP address.
And like dutiful sheep, we used those 30 Power Vote codes, every day, and we Power Voted for Lea Kaydus.
At that time I didn’t question it. I should have, but I didn’t. We were just so gosh darn happy to be helping the awesome founder of Animals For Autism win a grant to fund the training of 10 service dogs to be placed with deserving children in spring ’12.
Not to build a “facility”….. but I digress.
So somehow, every single day Lea Kaydus came up with codes from 30 Pepsi products. Just for my family, she somehow got the codes from 900 Pepsi products during the month of May. Just for MY family.
That would sure be a lot of potty breaks!
Now, what if I told you that she was sending even more codes to other families. Lots more. Some households were receiving 70 Power Votes a day.
Seventy.
Math on that one…. 70 codes x possible 100 votes = 70,000 votes A DAY x 30 days…..2,100,000 votes possible.
Did I mention she was sending these mysteriously obtained Power Codes to multiple families?
The couple of times she was questioned about where she was obtaining all these codes resulted in two different answers.
Answer 1 – Why, they are being donated by the sweet people in her community.
Answer 2 – Gosh golly, her local Pepsi distributer thinks she is so amazing that they are giving her all the codes.
So, uh…where did they come from?
Fishy…