31 October 2007

DJ CLEARED OF POLL Fraud

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American trance DJ Christopher Lawrence has been cleared of any wrong doing in the voting for this year's DJ Mag Top 100 poll. Lawrence was among the DJs at the heart of an alleged vote rigging scam at the awards scheme, with a number of DJs have been accused of multiple votes. Lawrence was accused of ordering an employee to develop a computer code that entered multiple votes for him. But DJ Mag has said that, having investigated the matter, it is confident that Lawrence was not involved in any cheating.

DJ Mag publisher James Robertson said in an interview to the CMU Music Network: "DJ Mag has been in lengthy Discussions with Christopher Lawrence following our discovery of voting irregularities. We fully accept his explanation that he, personally, had no involvement in any cheating. DJmag has always believed, regardless of 2007's anomalies, that Christopher is an excellent DJ who stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the world's best. We look forward to him resuming his rightful place amongst the leading performers in the Top 100 DJs 2008 poll".

In an interview with clubbing website Skrufff, Lawrence himself said:

"Apparently there were multiple votes from single IP addresses. DJ Mag felt it was suspicious and contacted my team to see if we knew anything about it. We didn't, so we arranged for the marketing manager who was handling my Top 100 campaign to speak to them. He explained that he promotes the vote to street teams of 100,000- 150,000 people, mainly students. My team hired him because he had done campaigns like People's Choice Awards in the US as well as work for major record labels and movie studios. He said he had never had problems before, but clearly DJ Mag had a problem with his methods and the multiple votes were irregular, so we had to ask him to step aside".

On the discovery that he was being barred from this year's Poll, he continued: "My wife was worried and considered signing me up with a wedding DJ agency, but fortunately there has been no impact whatsoever. No cancelled bookings. Nothing. So I guess I can put my Kool & the Gang records away. No weddings any time soon".

From: NIGHT Online

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