Anyone with a Twitter account will be familiar with online posts by companies asking people to retweet their messages in order to enter competitions.

Running along the lines of ‘RT for a chance to win [X]’, businesses have latched on to the marketing ploy as a way to get users to bring the company’s message into their followers’ timelines.

Now, someone has developed a bot to do just that - and he's won more than a thousand prizes as a result.

Download the new Independent Premium app

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

In an article explaining his technique, Hunter Scott revealed that he wrote a Python script which: logs on to Twitter, searches for the phrase ‘retweet to win’ and then retweets said posts.

In total, his bot (named @racer236) retweeted the posts of more than 165,000 competitions and won 1,000 prizes over a nine-month period.

He explained: “I won a lot of cool stuff, and getting mysterious things through my mailbox each day was pretty fun.

“The most valuable thing I won was a trip to New York Fashion Week, which included a limo ride to the show if you lived in a state near New York for you and a friend, and $500 spending money.”

However, he admitted that some of the prizes weren’t as useful to him as others: “My favourite thing that I won was a cowboy hat autographed by the stars of a Mexican soap opera that I had never heard of. I love it because it really embodies the random outcome of these competitions.”

Statistically speaking, the bot's success rate worked out at just under 1 per cent.

Comments

Share your thoughts and debate the big issues

Learn more
Please be respectful when making a comment and adhere to our Community Guidelines.
  • You may not agree with our views, or other users’, but please respond to them respectfully
  • Swearing, personal abuse, racism, sexism, homophobia and other discriminatory or inciteful language is not acceptable
  • Do not impersonate other users or reveal private information about third parties
  • We reserve the right to delete inappropriate posts and ban offending users without notification

You can find our Community Guidelines in full here.

Create a commenting name to join the debate

Please try again, the name must be unique Only letters and numbers accepted
Loading comments...
Loading comments...
Please be respectful when making a comment and adhere to our Community Guidelines.
  • You may not agree with our views, or other users’, but please respond to them respectfully
  • Swearing, personal abuse, racism, sexism, homophobia and other discriminatory or inciteful language is not acceptable
  • Do not impersonate other users or reveal private information about third parties
  • We reserve the right to delete inappropriate posts and ban offending users without notification

You can find our Community Guidelines in full here.
Loading comments...
Loading comments...