On 22nd April 2008, eMenang published a contest called “AXA AFFIN TURNING POINT CONTEST” which offer a Grand Prize of RM50,000. From that moment onwards until the finale event which took place on 5th July 2008, there have been a lot of incidents which we think had clearly jeopardize the credibility of this contest.

As an introduction, AXA AFFIN TURNING POINT CONTEST is an online interactive game-based competition. It’s free and opens to citizens and permanent residents of Malaysia aged 21yrs old and above. Anyone can register at the website and start playing. All participants can play as many times as they want. Each game lasts around 20 minutes but if your wealth goes to zero then its game over. The top 8 scorers at the end of the game will win the prizes.

There are few version of complaints that we received regarding this contest from our forum members who took part in this competition. Below are some that we would like to share with you.

-By friend on Tue Jul 01, 2008 10:58 am-
“Ya, last night very funny. Those name overtake that top 8 list will suddenly disappear and gone and the top 8 list also sometimes will disappear for a while but then amazing appear again.

I suspect that they hacked those overtake them and they also been hacked by other but they manage to recover back.

My account in this game had been altered. I can’t even log in or retrieve the password using my email. They had stole my password and email and changed it. They had stolen all the players data!!!

I had called that AXA “Leng Sooi”. She don’t even want to attention us. According to her that their system is very secured, no one else can hack into the system!!! But the fact is, my info has been altered!!! And she not dare to take a step to verify what I said!!!”

-By anonymous_tipper on Mon Jul 07, 2008 9:20 pm-
“Hmm, my participation in AXA is pretty minimal. I had my fun during the first few days when most of the the hoo-haas occured, gave up on it during the 2 months in between. Then I checked back on the game again a week before closing date. I saw some new names and some old names on the ranking.

I happened to witness the following event:

On June 26th, around 6.30pm, the rankings page was blanked out (see below image). I assumed axa finally did a board reset and removed everyone.
I overjoyed, and decided to jump onto the game again with a close mate (anonymous_zzz, eheheh).

Surprisingly we managed to entered the rankings with crappy scores. An hour or two passed, some other random players who happened to be playing at that time joined us in the chart. For a short moment in time, the chart was filled with happy, crappy, noobie players.

I went out for dinner and such, and returned to check around midnight. Some of the familiar names returned, like choon xx, loo xx, wong xx, etc. I
went to sleep, and by the next morning, the chart was filled up with almost all the names of the
current final 8 players again.

This happened within the timespan of 12 hours, so most of you probably have missed this. I believe axa was genuinely trying to push the reset button and give everyone a fair strike at it, but it dint make any difference since they dint want to fix their original problem/bug/security issues. In my opinion, I think it was quite a lazy and pathetic attempt they took at making things right.”

-By jaaroquai on Mon Jul 07, 2008 10:16 pm-
“I started playing on the 1st week when the contest go online. During that time, the max score on the ranks was around 5 million points. Kept on playing but almost all of my attempt failed to get me into the ranks.

Later, the 1 million mark broken. The 24 million points came out topping the 1st rank. Well, this is the turning point of the game actually. The score boost up all other contestant to brain-storming a way to achieve a greater score than that. Walla… few more people managed to score more than that. 30 millions to 50 millions plus.

During this time, the only 8 Digits Slots available for Wealth, Quality of Life and Game Points.

The game continues and many people manage to get to XX millions and suddenly BOOM! A full 9 in all 8 slots. I kept on playing and in the same time trying to read the game. Many said theres loopholes and things like that, but for a beginner like me, I guess I’m a bit slow in finding the holes. Until 1 day, I paused the game and see the dice which is active on the page. I tried clicking on the dice and walla… the game can continue.. fuiyyohhh syok syok!!! I was happy. I can score big now but everytime I reached the 2nd stage the game always hang. so i never completed the game by using this loophole.

Then they reviewed the game and do some clean up and upgraded the slots to 14 digits.

No worries.. I kept trying again. Now, I found the best trick that i think most of the top ranks use them. The PAUSE MODE. after throwing the dice, press pause and then wait till the card opens. You save a lot of time. and unPAUSE ONLY when the card has open. For 1st stage i can reach hundreds of thousands easily and thats how i can get full points. However, I tried many times and I can say out of 100 less than 10 I can complete the game. The other, always hang and need to restart. But i dont give up, I kept trying until i achieved the score. With this trick you dont need to worry about flash setting low or high.

The error “A Script in this movie is causing Adobe Flash Player 9 to run slowly. If it continues to run, your computer may become unresponsive. Do you want to abort the script.”

But wait… my score not in the ranks. Later found out that my score need verification. It took about hmm..I would say about 5 working days. I already sent few emails and made 2-3 phone calls to AXA but not nice la them. not friendly and talk nonsense.

For added information, the brand awareness campaign is designed by Grey Worldwide and bears a slight resemblance to Great Eastern’s ‘Live 100 Percent’ campaign, also by Grey. Some of the participants from eMenang has contacted the customer line and even sent an email. Unfortunately some did not received any reply at all and for some who did received it, it was not really helpful either. Below is sample of email which one of the complainants received.

Dear XXX,

With reference to the terms and conditions of the contest stated below and the contest ending 30th June, we will not be reviewing any appeal and query from players. The finale event will be held on 5th July where players will have to play the game LIVE.

I can only advise you that the contest is well scrutinized and monitored to ensure that the game is played on a fair level. In order for players to be ranked, their scoring and game play will have to go through a level of security verification check and any submission that failed the validation will automatically be nulled and void.

Disqualification of Submissions
AXA AFFIN Life Insurance Berhad may, in its sole discretion, disqualify any submissions, and prohibit further participation in this Contest by, any person who tampers with or benefits from any tampering with the submission process or with the operation of this Contest.
Problems affecting competition
If for any reason any aspect of this Contest is not capable of running as planned, including by reason of infection by computer virus,network failure, bugs, tampering, unauthorized intervention, fraud, technical failures or any cause beyond the control of AXA AFFIN Life Insurance Berhad which corrupts or affects the administration, security, fairness, integrity or proper conduct of this Contest, AXA AFFIN Life Insurance Berhad may in its sole discretion cancel, terminate, modify or suspend this Contest, or invalidate any affected submissions.

AXA AFFIN Life Insurance Berhad

We aware that the judges decision is final but what we are trying to say is this contest might had been hacked easily since the beginning till the end. It is neither about questioning the 7 finalist who were born at the same year nor about doubting the Top 3 winners who then again were born on the same year of 1986. For us, it is the integrity of the contest that were not taken into account seriously despite various attempts being made by participants to notify the organizer. The hi-scores were reset numerous times even until the last minute and some of the compers here already gave up on it long before the dateline since they think that it will be impossible for them to be among the finalist. For a log of hi-scores that we keep track throughout this competition, please refer here.

Honestly we are glad that AXA is willing to come up with such competition in the first place. However, we strongly feel this contest has been organized and managed poorly. We hope AXA would be more serious and responsible when organizing such contest in the future since we believe that a contest without proper attention to online bugs will only promote a hacker rather than a true winner.”

-On behalf of Malaysia’s Biggest Comper Community, eMenang.com-