The Facebook Vote Groups Targeting Colossal Contestants — What You Need to Know

Within hours of entering a Colossal contest, you will receive your first invitation. It usually comes as a Facebook comment on your contestant post or as a direct message. Someone with a locked profile or a freshly created account will offer to help boost your votes. They might promise guaranteed placement in the top rankings. They might offer a vote package for a fixed price. They might invite you to join a Facebook group, where contestants help each other get votes.

Some of these groups have thousands of members. Some have been operating for years. And virtually all of them are either outright scams or in direct violation of the contest rules you agreed to when you entered.

I am writing this because I watched contestants get burned by these groups during my own Baby of the Year run with my son Julian back in 2025. Parents, who were genuinely competing in good faith lost votes, lost money, and in some cases lost their place in the competition entirely because they trusted the wrong people. Understanding what these groups are and what they actually do is not optional information for any serious Colossal contestant.

What These Groups Actually Are

The legitimate exchange groups

Not every vote exchange group is malicious. Some Facebook groups operate as informal communities, where contestants agree to vote for each other for free using their daily free votes. You vote for me today, I vote for you tomorrow. This type of reciprocal free voting is technically permitted under the contest rules, since both parties are using their one free daily vote legitimately.

The problem with even legitimate exchange groups is that they dilute your strategy. Contestants who spend their time managing vote exchanges often neglect the far more valuable work of activating their actual personal network and donor relationships, which is what actually determines outcomes in the later rounds.

The paid vote package scams

This is the category that causes real harm. These operations typically work in one of several ways.

They sell vote packages, claiming they have systems to generate large numbers of votes quickly. They collect payment in advance, often through Venmo, PayPal, or cash app, and either deliver nothing or deliver bot-generated votes that violate the contest rules and risk getting your entire profile flagged or disqualified.

They collect your contest profile link and your login credentials, under the pretense of needing access to manage your campaign. With your login information, they can access your profile, your personal information, and potentially your payment methods if you have saved them to any connected accounts.

They charge ongoing fees for continued vote support, creating a financial relationship that continues escalating as the contestant advances deeper into the competition and feels increasing pressure to maintain their ranking.

The donation coordination schemes

Some groups go further and organize coordinated donation campaigns, where multiple contestants pool money that is then distributed as donations among their own profiles. This type of arrangement violates the contest rules directly because it uses contestant funds to purchase votes for themselves, which is explicitly prohibited. A contestant caught participating in this type of scheme can be disqualified regardless of how many legitimate votes they have otherwise accumulated.

What the Contest Rules Say About This

Colossal contests are explicit on this point. The official rules state that Colossal does not monitor or control off-site activity via social media or third-party platforms. This means Colossal takes no responsibility for what happens in these Facebook groups and will not intervene to protect contestants who are victimized by them.

The rules also state that bot activity, or any kind of robotic or automated voting mechanism, is not an accepted form of voting and such votes will not be counted if discovered. Furthermore, Colossal reserves the right to disqualify competitors suspected of encouraging or participating in this type of activity.

The practical implication is that if a vote package service uses automated systems to generate votes for your profile, you bear the risk of disqualification even if you did not know the votes were bot-generated. Ignorance of how the service operates is not a defense under the contest rules.

How to Identify a Scam Group or Account

Profile warning signs

Locked or private profiles with no visible friends, posts, or history are a significant warning sign. Legitimate contestants share their contest links publicly. Someone who approaches you with a vote offer, but will not show you their own profile is almost certainly not a contestant themselves.

Newly created accounts with generic profile photos, no personal posts, and no visible network are another clear indicator. These are often accounts created specifically to run vote solicitation scams during active contest cycles.

Offer warning signs

Any offer that guarantees a specific placement or ranking is fraudulent. Colossal contest rankings are determined by public votes, that no third party can guarantee.

Any offer that asks for payment before delivering any service is a risk. Legitimate tools and resources for Colossal contestants, including my own free training at Voting Academy, allow you to evaluate the value before any money changes hands.

Any offer that asks for your login credentials or personal account access is an immediate disqualification from consideration. There is no legitimate service that requires access to your contest profile login.

Any offer promising to deliver hundreds or thousands of votes quickly at a fixed price is describing either bot-generated votes, fraudulent donations, or both. None of these outcomes are worth the risk.

What Happened to Contestants I Watched Get Burned

During the Baby of the Year run with my son, I watched several contestants in the same contest cycle make decisions that cost them their campaigns.

One parent paid for a vote package and posted that she moved up her rankings due to a large number of votes. By the end of Group Finals, which is when Colossal published a holding page, on the entire Baby of the Year website, that they are verifying votes, her profile was flagged and she was removed from the competition entirely. She had been in 1st place and later posted how the contest is a scam because she could not advance.

Another parent joined a donation coordination group and contributed money thinking it was a legitimate community fundraising strategy. When the group's activity was detected, her donations were voided and her ranking dropped dramatically in the final days before a round cutoff she posted that she had been preparing for weeks.

Both of these parents were genuinely trying to win for the right reasons. Neither of them understood that the groups they trusted were putting their campaigns at risk.

What to Do Instead

The contestants who advance consistently in Colossal competitions are not the ones who find clever workarounds. They are the ones who understand the mechanics of the system and execute legitimate strategy better than everyone else in their group.

That means understanding how the 24-hour free vote window works and timing your supporter reminders correctly. It means knowing which round you are in and what type of voter engagement that round requires. It means approaching donors in a way that feels like a genuine ask rather than spam. And, it means understanding the timing buffers around the Thursday cutoff that protect your votes from the server congestion that affects thousands of contestants every week.

None of that requires paying anyone for vote packages. None of it violates the contest rules. And all of it is covered in the free strategy training at Voting Academy before your next cutoff.