Vote-rigging has forced one of Russia‘s leading broadcasters to scrap the results of a popular children’s singing contest.
Channel One admitted its voting process had been corrupted by thousands of text messages sent by bots in favour of contestant Mikella Abramova.
Mikella, the daughter of a pop star and a wealthy banker, won the final of The Voice Kids’ sixth season with an overwhelming 57 per cent of the vote.
An investigation by cyber-security firm Group-IB uncovered “massive automated SMS spamming” in favour of the 10-year-old.
The company added in a statement: “In total, about 300 phone numbers were involved in this manipulation, with more than 8,000 SMS messages sent from these numbers.
“All the phone numbers belong to the same mobile operator with the same rate plan used. The involved numbers were out of service at the time of investigation.”
The girl’s fellow contestants “found out there are no fair elections in Russia,” blogger StalinGulag joked on Twitter.
Channel One said it would hold a new final on 24 May in which all the finalists would compete.
The broadcaster said The Voice Kids was “designed to give only positive experience to each of the participants” and that ”we believe that children should not be held accountable for actions not taken by them”.
It added: ”Channel One will also take steps to improve and further protect the voting mechanism and to ensure that what happened does not happen again.”
