Case: we refunded the deposit and walked away

This is a story about a job we did not finish. A photographer in Porto sent us a deposit on 11 March 2025 for a voting campaign in a regional photo contest. Four days later we returned the money in full and told her to enter a different contest. We are publishing the case because most agencies would never admit this happened, and we think that silence is part of why this industry has a bad reputation.

What the client wanted

She was a wedding photographer, mid-thirties, building a portfolio in the documentary style. The contest offered a feature in a print magazine and roughly EUR 2,400 in studio rental credits at a partner space in Lisbon. Voting ran for 21 days. She had already uploaded her submission, a quiet black-and-white frame from a baptism in Aveiro, and she wanted help getting it in front of the right audience over those three weeks.

Our standard pipeline for this kind of brief is straightforward. We audit the contest rules, run a small Meta Ads test against a lookalike of her existing Instagram followers, and write three or four pieces of organic copy she can post herself. Nothing exotic. We had budgeted around 42 hours across the campaign and quoted accordingly. She paid a 30% deposit. Everything looked normal.

What we found when we read the ToS

We always read the contest terms before we touch an ad account. This is not optional and it is the cheapest insurance we know. The whole audit usually takes one of us about 90 minutes. On this one it took closer to four hours, because the more we read, the stranger it got.

The contest was hosted on a third-party platform that we will not name here, because the dispute is private and we have no interest in a public fight. Their own published terms, last updated 14 January 2025, said three things very clearly:

• Entrants were forbidden from "directing paid traffic" to their submission page.
• Each unique vote required a confirmed email address, with a "one device, one vote" technical rule.
• Entries that received "anomalous traffic spikes" could be disqualified at the platform's discretion.

Fine. Strict, but coherent. The problem was on a different page of the same site. The platform was simultaneously selling a "Featured Entry" upgrade for EUR 89 that put a submission at the top of the gallery, and a "Booster Pack" for EUR 149 that promised "increased visibility to verified voters". They were, in plain reading of their own rules, operating a paid promotion system that contradicted the no-paid-traffic clause they applied to entrants. They had also quietly added an arbitration clause on 27 February 2025 that pushed disputes into a jurisdiction neither of us would want to be sued in.

So we had a contest where the platform was breaking its own published rules and reserving the right to disqualify our client for traffic the platform itself was selling. That is not a contest. That is a trap with a prize attached.

Why we did not just run the campaign anyway

An honest question, and one we ask ourselves. We could have run a tiny, careful Meta Ads campaign, kept the daily spend under EUR 8, avoided any traffic pattern that looked like a spike, and probably gotten away with it. The client would have been happy. We would have kept the rest of the fee.

Here is the contrarian opinion we will defend: most "vote promotion" agencies stay in business because they accept this kind of job. They read the rules, decide the risk is the client's, take the money, and run. We think that is a quiet form of fraud. The client is paying for expertise, and the expertise includes telling them when the contest itself is not worth entering. If we only earn money by ignoring red flags, we are not really selling marketing services, we are selling plausible deniability.

There was also a practical issue. Meta's Fraud, Scams and Deceptive Practices policy, and Google's Misrepresentation policy, both prohibit ads that "promote participation in" or "drive traffic to" sites that engage in deceptive practices against their own users. A platform charging entrants to bypass rules it enforces against other entrants fits that description well enough that we did not want our ad account anywhere near it. Account suspensions are slow and expensive to appeal, and we have lost one before.

What we actually did, in order

1. On 14 March 2025 we sent the client a 600-word memo with screenshots of the two contradictory pages of the platform's site, the dates of the relevant ToS revisions, and a plain-language explanation of why we were uncomfortable continuing.
2. We refunded the full deposit the same day via the same payment method she used. No fees deducted, no "consultation charge", nothing. Our refund policy covers this scenario explicitly because we wrote it after a similar case in 2023.
3. We spent another two hours putting together a short list of three contests we considered legitimate for a Portuguese-based documentary photographer. One was a regional newspaper competition with a clear voting cap and named jurors. One was a EU-funded cultural project under Regulation (EU) 2021/818 (Creative Europe), which has strict transparency requirements on prize allocation. One was a magazine's annual print competition with no voting component at all, judged entirely by editors.
4. We offered to run a smaller engagement on whichever of those she chose, at the original hourly rate, with no new deposit required.

What she did next

She picked the third option, the editor-judged print competition. There was nothing for us to "promote" because there was no public voting, so the engagement we ended up doing was different in shape: portfolio sequencing advice, a rewrite of her artist statement, and a single sponsored post on Instagram aimed at the magazine's editor demographic rather than at voters. Total invoice: EUR 380, which is less than a third of what the original campaign would have billed.

She did not win. She was shortlisted, the magazine published two of her images in their July 2025 issue, and she got three booking inquiries from it. We count that as a good outcome. She tells us she counts it the same way. We do not have a glossy testimonial to show you because we did not ask for one and we will not.

What we learned, and what we did wrong

We got something wrong here too. Our intake form at the time asked the client for the contest URL but not for the version of the ToS on the day she entered. By the time we read the rules, the platform had revised them twice in eight weeks. If she had pushed back and demanded we run the campaign, we would have had a harder time pointing at a fixed document. We changed the intake form on 19 March 2025 to capture a PDF snapshot of the rules at the moment of signup. Small fix. Long overdue.

We also took too long to make the call. Four hours of reading on a job that should have been killed in 30 minutes is a sign that we were looking for reasons to keep the work rather than reasons to walk. Worth naming.

What this means if you are reading this as a prospective client

We will not run a campaign for a contest where the host platform is breaking its own rules. We will not run a campaign where the only realistic path to winning involves buying votes, using bots, opening fake accounts, or paying the contest host for guaranteed placement. We do not log into your contest account on your behalf. We do not promise vote counts or finishes. None of this is new on the site, but cases like this one are why those lines exist.

If you are not sure whether the contest you entered is legitimate, send us the link before you send us money. We will read the rules for free and tell you honestly. About 18% of the contests people ask us about in the first quarter of 2026 have failed our basic audit, which is a higher number than we expected when we started counting. You can see how the audit fits into the rest of the work on the process page, and the boundary conditions are spelled out in plain language on the FAQ.

The shortest version of our pitch: we would rather refund you on day four than apologize to you on day twenty-one. We have done both. The first one is cheaper for everyone.

If your contest passes the audit and you want help, the next step is on the contact page. If it does not, we will tell you that for free and we will try to point you at a contest that does. That is the part of the job we are most proud of, even though it is the part that earns us the least money.