It sounds like a fun, friendly online competition. Some cute dogs are chosen, and the public votes for their favorites. At the end, one dog claims the top prize.
So how did the Honorary NYC Dog Mayor Election of 2024 turn into a morass of ballot stuffing, vituperation and — ugh — cryptocurrency-influenced chicanery?
The early rounds of the 16-dog bracket seemed normal: Mello the Samoyed beat Puccini the Yorkiepoo. Mr. Tobi the silky terrier beat Louie the French bulldog.
But something was up with Bertram the Pomeranian. He was a likely favorite on his own, given his nearly 400,000 Instagram followers, and his social media moment posing as an uncanny Paddington Bear look-alike.
As the competition progressed, however, it seemed that somebody had created a cryptocurrency named after Bertram and begun pushing his candidacy. And some of the coin’s enthusiasts were sure that the better Bertram did in the contest, the more the price of his eponymous currency would rise.
Another strong contender was Enzo the Shih Tzu, owned by Olivia Caputo, a full-time influencer. (Enzo has almost 100,000 Instagram followers and, like the other entrants, was recruited for the competition.)
“I thought it would be fun and a good way to engage our audience,” Ms. Caputo said in an interview. “It would be so silly for Enzo to have a title. I did it for the fun of it all. It turned out not to be very fun.”
Stephen Calabria, who runs podcasts for the Mount Sinai Health System, started the contest in 2022. “Frankly, I had always envisioned this as a good faith and good humored way to get shelter dogs adopted and to use this as a platform for good,” he said. “If I never hear the word crypto again, it will be a blessing.”
Ms. Caputo said she first noticed something was awry in the quarterfinal matchup between Bertram and Ziggy the Yorkie mix.
Bertram’s vote total increased sharply, to 4,000-plus votes, after receiving about 1,000 in the first round. That uptick coincided with people starting to push the dog hard on social media platforms and even posting offers of money for others to vote for him, Ms. Caputo said.
She discovered a public chat on Telegram about the contest with thousands of messages a day, she said: “They were using very hateful and violent language to Enzo. They said they would use the platform to ‘pump the price.’”
Thousands of cryptocurrencies are listed on exchanges and websites, and most are thinly traded and extremely volatile. It’s relatively easy to create a new coin and pitch it as a path to rapid riches for speculative traders.
Insiders and early buyers then vie to acquire the coin before others push up the price and sell before the bottom falls out. Such “pump-and-dump” schemes have caught the attention of regulators, who have scrambled to keep up with the freewheeling crypto industry.
The coin named for Bertram, which is priced in fractions of a cent and appears to have traded since early October, saw a spike in price over the weekend, roughly doubling, and then just as quickly erasing those gains in recent days.
One message that was circulating among supporters of the Bertram currency advised people to get an Instagram account to vote in the contest, with some guidance: “Post a few pictures. You know what I mean. Basically, don’t look like a bot.”
When Enzo advanced to a final-round matchup against Bertram, Ms. Caputo decided to withdraw her dog. “I don’t want my name attached to any pump-and-dump scheme,” she said. “It sucked out all the fun and cheapened the whole thing.”
“Stephen worked hard to build this platform and people took advantage of it,” she said, adding: “I sent the screen shots to Stephen, and he wouldn’t do anything about it.”
Mr. Calabria said: “I feel boxed in here. There’s not a whole lot that I can do. I’m not responsible for folks out there on the internet. And none of the stuff we were ever forwarded would have altered the outcome of previous elections.”
Bertram’s owner, Kathy Grayson, an art gallery owner who adopted him from a shelter in Oklahoma, said she had “nothing to do with the coin at all. Some random people started it.” (She also wanted it to be known that she mostly calls her dog Bertie, rather than the more formal Bertram he goes by in the contest.)
“Bert retired from being a pet influencer last year because it got to be a bit too much,” she said. “This was the first thing since he retired that sounded fun and positive.”
And it was fun, she said — until her dog’s candidacy was hijacked.
“The whole thing has been in a way, darkly hilarious,” she said. “It has absorbed the anxiety facing people in human elections. People are getting worked up projecting all the human stuff.”
With Enzo out, the dog he beat in the semifinals, Simon the basset/cattle dog, advanced instead to meet Bertram in the final.
But the skulduggery persisted. “I noticed spikes at certain times of the vote for Bertram,” Mr. Calabria said. “There were certain things that just didn’t seem right. Like blocs of 2,000 votes at once. It went from neck-and-neck to Bertram winning by 96 percent or something.”
“Simon clearly won the website and Facebook,” he said of the voting. “It’s the Instagram that skewed everything.”
What could be done to make every human and dog happy? On Tuesday, it was revealed that Bertram had decided to be the bigger dog and concede the election to Simon. “He wants what’s best for all humans and non-humans,” Mr. Calabria said.
Bertram’s owner, Ms. Grayson, said: “The honest answer is, this all seemed to be too much of a headache. I was like, ‘This poor guy tried to have this fun thing, instead he’s going to spend two weeks hand counting because of some crypto.’ People were in way too deep and making it way too serious.
“Bert can be deputy mayor.”
The post How Crypto Enthusiasts Hijacked a Dog Mayor Competition appeared first on New York Times.
