In a past life I worked at a marketing agency. When we'd run random drawings, I'd (properly) randomly select and provide a winner. It happened more than once t

In a past life I worked at a marketing agency. When we'd run random drawings, I'd (properly) randomly select and provide a winner. It happened more than once that the marketing side would come back and ask for a new winner because of a situation like us doing a drawing for a prize from an ISP, and the winner's email being "@competitorisp.net". As far as I know (and I've got a reasonable basis for this), the clients never requested this or anything. It was purely our marketing guys not liking the optics of telling the client that a competitor's customer won. And yeah, for some giveaways and stuff they'd take a list of people and trawl through their social media accounts to figure out who'd have the most impact. Again, don't think the clients had requested this, it just made the job we're doing look better to show the client "Yeah this person won and look at all the social media buzz it created!" rather than "Yeah we gave it to someone that looks like a troll, has no media presence, and the only people that will probably hear about this are a few people in an IRC chatroom." If it's not regulated (or small enough that the regulators won't notice), I'd assume any contest/etc like this is probably rigged. Marketing is, generally, an industry full of lies. The contests are no different.