On December 31 2018, Golden Disk Award voting window for "Most Popular Artist Award" closed with 0.16% difference between the first and second place.
But all the drama started on January 2, 2019, when SBS made a statement that EXOLs used illegal methods to vote. They accused EXO LAB, a fan club, based on a tutorial they posted for using infinite voting method. They accused fans for creating IDs with stolen phone numbers to increase votes. Following the accusation, every Kmedia made a news on it, without even investigating on the issue or hearing out from all the parties involved. After all, 7 years in the industry and still anything that EXO and EXOL does is a sensation, Kmedia just want to put a giant zoom glass on it for clicks and views. The popularity of the band and the power of their fandom is no joke.
Here's the truth~
On January 6, 2019, EXOLAB made a statement giving full explanation on the issue "In addition to DB migration mentioned, the number of overlapping votes with the separate application installed, etc., far exceeds 168 votes. Despite there are lot of cases like this, we will inquire again regarding the fact that if the voting through Golden Disk outside route was also cut properly for the 168 votes".
They also apologized for informing about the infinite voting method.
Also, GDA's voting app company LG U+ Idol Live, released a statement "We have found that there are no personal information theft or leakage issues" denying the previous accusation by SBS. They also released a clear information on the number of illegal votes made. They However, they did not mention the names of the artists to which the votes were made, instead used the terms "Group A" and "Group B".
"It was confirmed that 168 votes were placed in the specific idol group A and 184,332 votes in the idol group B through cheating, and the results were sent to the Golden Disk Awards secretariat. The results of this popular cheating vote did not change and only the right votes were reflected in the final vote."
To their statement, the app company also added some ridiculous assumptions on who is group A and group B based on the user names used for the illegal voting.
EXO LAB has in turn made a statement that they will be taking legal actions against anyone who makes baseless accusations on them.
The statement released by LG U+ "168 illegal votes were placed on group A" matches with the statement made by EXOLAB, which obviously means that EXO votes are indicated as group A. After excluding the 168 votes, the final 4665157 votes for EXO i.e 99.999% of EXOL votes are proved to be legal.
Which means, 184332 illegal votes (group B) are made by BTS Army?
BTS' Chinese fans were accused of cheating in GDA voting which was facilitated via Netease. This is the only music voting app that has signed contract with BTS' company Bighit in China. It means that the voting in China has no third party service to monitor.
On December 31, Netease froze their app in the midnight, after unfreezing, votes for BTS skyrocketed making over 50,000 votes in just 4 minutes, whereas increase in votes for EXO was found to be consistent. Chinese EXOLs noticed this abnormal behavior in vote increase and gathered more evidence supporting the accusation.
The most suspicious part is, at one point, the Netease app did not allow the users to vote for EXO, but allowed for others!!
No Kmedia covered this news even when the evidences were flooded in the internet. EXOLs are demanding proper investigation on this.
Now it's EXOLs turn to demand apology from everyone who attempted to defame them.
Kpop music award industry has lost it's standards - a popular opinion currently in the kpop community. "Rigged" is the word. Cheating in voting is not a new phenomenon that occurred in 2018 out of the blue. In 2017 Mnet MAMA awards, millions of votes made on BTS was removed due to rigged and illegal voting. Yet, no media reported about it. Also in recent vlive voting, it was found out that 5 million illegal votes were made for BTS, which was later removed by vlive. This never made to media either. But when it's EXO and EXOL, Kmedia is suddenly interested! All these biased actions can only be seen as an attempt to defame EXOL and EXO. Too bad, truth will always reveal itself.
EXOL are a voting power house. For 7 years, they have been winning every voting and every polls for EXO. Honestly there is no bigger and dedicated fandom than EXOL when it comes to win things for their faves. They are that powerful and they simply don't have the need to cheat. This year, EXO boycotted every award shows (coz they simply don't care about awards anymore), yet the award shows always nominated EXO in their polls just for clout from EXOLs. In 2018, SMA added EXO to their polls, which was a paid voting process. EXOLs won it fair and square. Yet SMA did not nominate EXO, simply because they din't attend. Also, SMA did not reveal that EXO won't attend the show and literally robbed EXOLs. Again, this too never made to media!. After all the act from kpop industry to sabotage EXO, many EXOLs stopped showing interest in award votes.
Well, the final verdict is - EXOL simply don't have the need to cheat. If they want to win, they can easily do it without a sweat. Accusing EXOLs for illegal voting is like accusing God of wealth for stealing a penny. The accusation is invalid. Cancelled.
Truth and Facts Only - Every word of it!
The KTruth
Creating your own fake news website is already pretty pathetic, but lying about the order of the events and the content of EXOLAB statement while sharing its translation is by far the saddest sht y'all have pulled lmao.
1. GDA made their statement first. They published it on the announcement board of the voting app on january 6th at 00:00 KST. In this statement they announced first that two groups were found to have fraudulent votes and that one of them had 168 votes.
2. EXOLAB made their statement following that one, on january 6th at 6:20AM KST. SIX HOURS LATER. They didn't come up with the number '168' first, they specifically used it because it was announced by GDA
they Chinese voting app didn't allow us to vote EXO? How and Why? Really weird and biased, tho.
Thank you for being one of the few trustworthy medias, this will bring you too much hate since everyone only wants to heat what pleases them instead of hearing the truth, but please don't let that get to you, continue to tell the truth and only the truth.
Exols please wake up. You can all go look at Exolab's statement tweet yourself. It was uploaded AFTER the GDA and U+ statements. That is a FACT. It is also a FACT that Exolab is not claiming Exo is group A or that the 168 votes is from Exols. You should ask her yourself lol. Your fandom needs better translators, because you're spreading misinformation and mistranslation. It is also a fact that GDA stated most of the fake ID had Exo-related names. It is also a fact that if BTS was group B then they would not have won, because the difference in the final votes were only 16K. And U+ stated the illegal votes would not have changed the…
Lol EXO Lab admitted the168k votes and 184K is yours and thats why you won!