FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

How This Guy Won 1,000 Contests on Twitter

He’s the luckiest guy on Twitter, if you consider getting a free Papa Roach album to be lucky.
Image: Daniel Oberhaus

If you move in the Twittersphere, odds are you've seen a few 'retweet to win' (RT2W) contests, which might make you the proud owner of gems like this porcelain owl. But had you been playing back in early 2015, your odds of winning any one of the thousands of RT2W contests hosted on the social media platform each year would have been significantly lower thanks to Hunter Scott, the luckiest guy on Twitter.

Advertisement

"Have you ever had an idea that worked out like one hundred times better than you hoped?" Scott, a computer engineer working at "a startup you've never heard of," asked a DEF CON audience on Saturday. "Well, this is one of those ideas."

Over the course of a nine month period beginning in the fall of 2014, Scott entered about 160,000 RT2W contests and managed to win nearly 1000 of them. By the time everything was said and done, he had amassed a large collection of totally random, and often bizarre, objects: a Papa Roach album on vinyl; used Tupperware lids warped by some guy's dishwasher; a ten-foot tall pornographic poster; and a cowboy hat signed by three members of an obscure Mexican soap opera, to name just a few.

Not everything Scott won was totally worthless, however. His bot also managed to win a $4000 trip to New York Fashion Week for its master, a prize Scott ultimately declined to accept to avoid the tax burden of such a large prize.

"When I wrote about this, some people were saying it's kind of lame because maybe there was someone that was a huge fan of that Mexican soap opera and they didn't get that thing because you did," said Scott. "I understand where they're coming from, but I would say I have the exact same amount of appreciation for that thing as they do, but for a totally different reason."

Scott's lucky streak was the result of some 50 lines of truly inspired coding on Python, but it took him a few tries to generate a script which wouldn't be immediately recognized as a bot and banned from the site. Twitter has a number of unpublished rate limits for user activity (such as the rate at which you can post or follow people), which it essentially uses as a safeguard against the creation of the kind of spambots that are created by people like Scott.

Advertisement

"The problem comes when [your bot] starts following person number 2000," Scott explained during his presentation. "Twitter has a limit where if you don't have any followers you can't follow more than 2000 people."

So Scott bought about 4000 followers for his bot and sallied forth. For the majority of his engineered lucky streak on Twitter, Scott was only using one bot. But eventually his thirst for Papa Roach vinyl got the best of him and he decided to open up multiple bot accounts all running his script, which required Scott to create a phone number on Twilio in order to open a Google voice account in order to open multiple Twitter accounts.

His small army of lucky bots allowed Scott to scale his operation while yielding increasingly absurd results. For instance, it wasn't uncommon for him to win multiple contests hosted by the same account (he ended up winning dozens of reservations to the same restaurant even though his bots all had similar names) and one time his bot retweeted a contest in which an account in India was giving away a postcard autographed by Scott, despite the fact that Scott had never met or heard of this person before and his Twitter scheme had not yet gained notoriety.

After nine months the jig was up and Scott's bots were deleted without an explanation, ending an unprecedented era of automated luck. As Scott told me after his presentation, he has been contacted by a number of users seeking to replicate his results, but their copies of his script don't make it through Twitter's filters these days. So unfortunately if you're looking to win warped Tupperware products, it looks like you're going to have to retweet the old fashioned way.