Facebook Competition: Post Like Cheating?

I am running a competition for a wedding photographer, basically they send me a photo - I add it to the competition folder and the photo with the most likes wins the prize.

One of the entrants photos that I uploaded went up 1000 exactly in a few hours after only being at 330 after 6 days, then 1 day later it was at 1340. Can I check to see if they are bought likes or if they are genuine? Most of the likes profiles don't have pictures so I am concerned that they have cheated.

Can I check this?

 

Facebook offers the option to promote pages or pictures via their ad manager page. Facebook makes it available on the newsfeed on all target users and has a call to action tag " like this page" something like that to get the likes.
I don't think you have the option to know whether they promoted or not because that data is only available at the user's end.

 

Yeh I know how the ad system works. But I googled buying facebook likes and you can purchase likes for certain posts / photos - you just have to put in the link address.

Over 800 of the likes they have don't have profile photos. I need to see if there is a way to prove they have cheated?

 

Pretty much this. Every single legit FB user has a profile photo of some sort, so it's easy to rule these out straight away. Another way is to check the activity, friends, likes etc. of the profiles if set public. Not always possible, but many fake profiles are not protected like that. This added with the pretty sudden jump in likes strongly suggests cheating and has grounds to more or less prove that.

 

I absolutely agree with this answer, really the thing that the most of the profiles you got likes from are without any profile picture, there is evidence at least.