The day the bubbles burst

 Cheats do win

Make no mistakes, cheats DO win, I know from experience; the only consolation I got was from exposing the fraud - several times.

I am reminded of the phrase from "The Rhinestone Cowboy," by Glenn Campbell - nice guys get washed away with the rain and snow.

One instance was when the person in question posted on LinkedIn she had won 0ver $300 first prize in a writing contest. She didn't like it when I posted, on her post, that her story was a copy/paste from a story I had read only weeks before in a book I bought from a friend. She could not dispute this fact, as she knew I was right (I posted a photo of the book).

Later that year, we were again in a contest, against my will, as I knew she'd cheat again to win. This contest was on a site run by a site in Germany.

Halfway through a friend pointed out that one of my stories had disappeared from the site. I only thought a little of it at first as sites often have glitches; until I noticed the vanished story was running third in the contest.

Okay, how many more had been deleted?

Only that story had been deleted.

Now, though I had no way to prove it, I knew the site had been hacked. I knew if she hadn't done it, she claimed not to know about computers, and she knew people who had the know-how as she was connected to a ticket scam in the USA.

My only solace, I came 4th in the contest as the person who hacked the site came third and won a prize. As I passed her a second time before the end of the contest I posted it on-site.

How do I know the site was hacked?

Easy, the person who hacked the site set up his program to get a certain number of votes per day to ensure I didn't get back in the top three; after all, once you're in, computing is a maths equation.