Seoul Music Awards Addresses Abnormal Votes Recorded For IZ*ONE

The Seoul Music Awards has issued a statement regarding measures taken to resolve an issue with abnormal votes on its app.

On December 18, the award show issued the following statement:

After the voting policy was changed as of midnight on December 17, 2019, we discovered abnormal voting activities on the Seoul Music Awards app.

We monitored the breakdown of votes for each separate category and found that during a specific time period, an abnormal method was used to create accounts and vote. The details are as follows.

• Time of occurrence: After 3:14 a.m. on December 17, 2019
• Category of occurrence: K-Wave Popularity Award, Popularity Award
• Artist of occurrence: IZ*ONE
• Number of votes for deletion: 753,708 votes for K-Wave Popularity Award. 110,109 votes for Popularity Award
• Deletion time: From 12:00 to 12:30 a.m. on December 19, 2019
• It’s possible that the related functions will not work smoothly during the deletion period.
• We confirmed that all the voting in other award categories was carried out normally.

As these were abnormally cast votes, all of those votes will be deleted and we have closed all the accounts used to cast those votes.

Through continued monitoring, Seoul Music Awards is doing everything possible to ensure that voting is carried out fairly.

We ask for everyone’s cooperation and participation so that there can continue to be a clean culture of voting and so that there is no harm done to the meaning of the awards designed for the stars who have lit up the year.

Thank you.

The 29th SMA will be held on January 30th, 2020 at Gocheok Sky Dome in Seoul. Voting runs until January 22.

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