For months the CryptoControl team has been working internally on designing and creating a referral program that could incentivise people to help grow the CryptoControl community and the product in a big way.

On March 26th, we launched our first referral campaign and we’re proud to say it has been a success! Unfortunately sometimes growing too fast can be a problem and that’s exactly what happened with us.

In this post we try to explain what happened. And what we did to ensure that we kept a good name in the ecosystem.

Filtering out fake referrals

Because of the large influx of users, the CryptoControl team has been proactively working to review each referral and rewarding users who have genuinely worked hard to make real referrals.

Since the referral program was incentivising people to bring users via email, it was no surprise to us that we found many users who had figured out ways to game the system.

The new referral page, with a captcha to avoid bots from making referrals.

To combat this, we immediately added a blacklist of known domains used often for creating disposable emails and we’ve also added a captcha to the referral page to avoid bots from creating fake accounts.

An example of an referral made from a fake email site (desoz.com)

Further to this, we also decided to review each and every referral made by every user, so that we could further filter out fake referrals that were not taken out automatically by the system.

Approximately 18,000 fake referrals were removed from the system. And those who made fake referrals automatically saw their rewards and referral counter subtracted accordingly. (A few of them complained and it took a lot of effort for us to explain to them why fake referrals were not counted).

This allowed us to ensure that we could easily distribute ETH & CCIO tokens to those who actually spent time to refer genuine people.

Distributing ETH & CCIO tokens properly

On day one of the campaign we were able to reward users with ETH and CCIO tokens almost instantly. Since there were very few referrals in number, we were to communicate and process all withdrawals within telegram itself. Instantly.

But unexpectedly by the next day, we saw about the number of referrers grow by nearly 50x! This was quite unexpected and we couldn’t handle to flood of messages on our telegram.

Which is why we quickly decided to restructure the site’s referral to ask for an ETH address as well. This allowed us to track the ETH address of every referrer, send the reward and update their token balance from within the site itself.

A screenshot of the withdrawal section which asks the user for his ETH address.

This allowed us to handle from 10–20 withdrawals (manually) to upto 1,000–5,000 withdrawals (automatically).

Henceforth; the CryptoControl team will be processing withdrawals every weekend. All the user needs to do is to fill in their ETH address on the referral page. Once set, we’ll automatically withdraw tokens every weekend and will keep our telegram community updated when we do so.