I am sure you must have received such text or mail:

Being a student in dire need of an internship I decided to give this a try and filled out the form for which one has to just login either using email or google login.

Once logged in you are automatically signed up for the ‘chance’ to get an internship. Although you can spread the word about the internship and increase your chances of getting the internship. This felt counterintuitive since getting more people to signup would just decrease your chances, its simple maths. But nope, this was all about getting more referrals, classic marketing strategy. There were even goodies for people with maximum referrals. It was not even possible for me to get 10 referrals let alone winning this contest. So I let it go and got back to binging TV shows.

I was not able to get this off my mind, so I thought this would be a good time to learn something new while also testing the Internshala’s website. I had previously done a ton of automation using python, so this time I wanted to take a dive into the javascript universe. After googling for a while I settled on using puppeteer but first I had to define the steps and scope I was trying to achieve.

My aim was to get 2000 referrals automagically and to get the devs at Internshala contact me to stop spamming them :)

Testing

Registering using google was not an option as I have a bit less than 2000 Gmail accounts and some of them would require 2FA, requiring human interaction.

Another option is to register using Email which requires the following details:

•  Email
•  Password (To be set, so not an issue)
•  First Name and Last Name (Can be generated, but sadly XÆA-12 won’t work)

Ok so the only real problem here is Email, I quickly entered [email protected] as yopmail is my go-to temp mail service. Sadly, it did not work:

I spent the next 15 min trying out all the temp mail services and hoping that at least one would work. Luckily many of them worked but only one had a free and easy API, so I settled on using mailsac. After my little adventure, they blocked mailsac too, hehe :)

I am not going to explain the code if you wanna have a look at code check here. The logic was pretty simple:

•  Generate some random details (First name, last name, password)
•  Register using [email protected]
•  Check the mail for the confirmation mail and press register
•  Profit???

I also saved the screenshot of the attempt just to see if there are any different results after a while or some anomalies. In the end, I had 2000+ screenshot out of which 1 was different and had failed due to the mail already being used by an employee, WOW!

Profit ??

Sadly no, neither did I receive any mail nor an internship. I don’t wanna place blame but at this point, I am very skeptical that anyone got that internship. If you are an employee at Internshala or know someone who got this or a similar internship/prize from such a contest on Internshala them please drop me a mail at [email protected].

Warning

Running such scripts on a website/company that you don’t have written permission from could potentially get you into a lot of trouble. I had taken the necessary precautions and was doing this with the intent of fun. I was also hoping they would contact me and I could sweet talk them into hiring me to fix these bugs.

If you would like me to test something or would like to hire me for a freelance project drop me a mail at [email protected]