App Responds to Charges of Fraudulent Yeezy Giveaway

A sneaker giveaway ended with a suspicious winner and social media complaints of foul play on Monday. But Frenzy, the sneaker app giving away the pair of "Zebra" Adidas Yeezy Boost 350 V2s, insists that the process was totally random and that the winner is legitimate.

The allegations began when Frenzy's official Twitter account tweeted out a winner for the giveaway on Monday. The winning account had only handful of followers and no tweets, which immediately led people to believe the contest was rigged.

"We use a tool for all of our giveaways to randomly pick the winner," explains Frenzy's leader of growth, Kevin Donnelly, in an interview with Sole Collector. "We don’t base the winner on how active they are on social media, or how influential they are online or anything like that."

Upon selecting a winner, Donnelly and Frenzy reached out to them to confirm their identity before tweeting about it. While Donnelly says he understands people's questions about the giveaway, he doesn't feel it would have been fair to deny the winner the sneakers for a lack of tweets or social media following. Twitter wasn't the only way to enter either: downloading the app and following Frenzy on other platforms counted, so conceivably someone with no Twitter account at all could have won.

Donnelly provided Sole Collector with the info of the winner, who we contacted via phone. And unless he and the Frenzy team very quickly trained someone to sound convincingly like a 17-year-old sneaker neophyte from Canada, we are inclined to believe their claims of legitimacy with respect to this contest.

The winner they put us in touch with was Josh Wou, who says he started collecting sneakers when the Ultra Boost picked up steam in late 2015. Wou's entered many giveaways for Yeezys before, but this was the first time he won. He found out about the free Yeezys coming his way while sitting in class.

"My phone buzzed when I was in my chem class and I was worried I was gonna get my phone taken away," Wou recalls, "but I see this freakin' e-mail that says, 'You’ve won Zebras' or something—I thought it was fake...By the end of my chem class I had like 100 [Twitter] notifications flaming me, telling me to kill myself."

Wou hasn't responded to any of the social media hate directed at him in the wake of the win save for a single tweet referencing his interview with Sole Collector. He says that he hardly ever uses Twitter but that he did have a few more tweets to his name prior to the giveaway, and that he deleted them all at one point—apparently he had a work interview and didn't want to have to explain Yeezy tweets to the interviewer.

While Donnelly initially told Sole Collector that Frenzy would run future giveaways in the exact same manner despite criticisms, today’s selection process for the winner of another pair of Yeezys was decidedly more transparent. For that, Frenzy started a livestream via Periscope showing the winner getting picked at random.