Four days ago we reported about the changes in e-Stars Seoul poll where the French team emuLate! managed to jump to first place with over 10,000 votes in a single day. Some claim that there were 8,000 votes in just 15 minutes.

Below are some interesting facts about "the Tsunami:"

10,000 votes in the period of 24 hours is not a small number for an esport poll and, naturally, aroused suspicion. Many people did not hesitate and accused the French of cheating. To their defence, the biggest esports and hardware websites in France made news items encouraging the French to vote for their best Counter-Strike team.

But even with a vast number of visitors, is it really possible to get so many votes in such a time span?

The picture below two shows a chart of the biggest French esport websites, esportsfrance and Team aAa are compared with the e-stars website. For some reason all three peak at the same time. Coincidence?



It could be that people may have changed their IPs and some just voted a "few" more times, which the fans of other teams must have done to some extent also.

Then, there is another thing that would indicate that someone has cheated with the votes. Everyone who participated in the voting knows that you must choose three teams to vote for. So if emuLate! received 10,000 votes it means that normally there should be an additional 20,000 mores votes divided between the other teams. But where did these 20,000 votes disappear?

Four days ago, 20,000 was more or less the sum of the votes casted on SK Gaming, Team ALTERNATE and Roccat together. The interesting thing is that it seems that other teams did not share the 20,000 between them because the number of votes for each team stayed more or less the same as before the Tsunami.

Something like that could be done with the adequate knowledge of JavaScript or by spoofing attacks or via GEMS.

The second picture shows today's voting numbers. As you can see, 29430.67 people have voted (we have arrived at this number by dividing the total number of votes by 3). How can a 0.67 of a person cast a vote?

In no situation should you get a number behind the comma unless you just add 2 more votes or any other number of votes which is not divisible by 3.

The evidence shown seems to indicate that someone rigged the poll. It can be safely assumed that fans of every team have tried to vote several times, but the Vote Tsunami is worth looking into by the e-Stars organisation.

Did someone cheat or is a badly coded poll the culprit?

UPDATE: Ethan P., the CEO of emuLate had the following to say about the situation:

"If someone was silly enough to cheat, we are not responsible. We asked nobody to vote for us. And if it's not the case, I don't know how the system calculates voting people.

We only know French esport websites put some advertising to ask people to vote for us. People asked guys at their work to vote too, even if they were not involved into esport just because we represent the nation and some of them organized MSN chain to ask for voting.

Well if e-Stars finds that the poll was rigged, what could I do? We are not responsible if silly guys tried to help us in an unfair way (if the investigation leads to this conclusion). Otherwise, I would like to thank all people supporting us, wherever they are."