Originally Posted by
jools1006
I can tell you how I was using the service before being banned:
-doing all my check-ins at once, rapid-fire, once a day.
-sometimes checking in from a distance, not in the immediate vicinity of the destination. Foursquare allows you to check in from twenty miles away if you so choose, unlike Facebook Places and Gowalla which just don't show places further away than a couple of hundred metres.
The relevant section of their terms and conditions that this behaviour violates is:
C. Topguest Rules.
By sharing a check-in at a place with Topguest, you represent and warrant that you are actually at that location. Topguest reserves the right to refuse to give rewards for checkins that Topguest, at its sole discretion, determines to be fraudulent or otherwise inauthentic.
My boyfriend's account has escaped the ban so far, and we've both begun checking in ONLY when actually at places or within very close range. His points are still accruing and I'm hoping to be reinstated.
I suspect the bans have nothing to do with whether you are actually near the location or not, as TopGuest can't determine this directly. You can check in to one location on the east coast and one on the west coast within seconds of each other (using an app) and it won't pose a problem. They could add the distances between the places you check in and divide by the time span to indirectly determine improbable situations, but this would be both cumbersome and inaccurate (not all check-in locations/times are properly reported). Instead, the bans are probably based on a simple threshold of too many check-ins within a certain time frame. Perhaps this isn't a 24-hour period, but a 7-day or month-long one, as they don't want to cry foul on the occasional rapid-fire-but-legit flurry. Be efficient, but not greedy, and everyone wins (including the companies gaining awareness).