An attendance app credited Tainan Harbour Rovers with 18,426 visits that never happened, according to Jakob Koelpin, a former quality-assurance engineer who says he helped build the system. The alleged entries span 14 home fixtures and made the club’s reported digital audience 43% higher than turnstile counts, Koelpin said in an interview on Tuesday.
The revelation has prompted Tainan’s municipal sports office to freeze NT$12.7 million (about €350,000) in pending facility payments and order a review of the club’s grant claims. The app’s maker, Morrowgate Metrics, also faces questions from two sponsors over NT$9.2 million (about €254,000) in payments tied to audience figures.
How the numbers grew
Koelpin said the app was meant to count ticket scans and nearby phones at the club’s South Canal Ground, a small stadium in southern Taiwan. During periods when the venue’s network failed, a software routine labelled “continuity fill” added visits from a test pool of devices, he said. The entries appeared in the same dashboard as real scans, without a warning that they were estimates.
He said he raised the issue with managers three times before leaving the company in July. On 3 November, Koelpin demonstrated the dashboard’s count against match-by-match gate totals to the public-contracts review office. A review of the figures supplied to sponsors and the city confirmed the discrepancy, according to a sports-office official familiar with the check.
The system turned a list of test phones into people who supposedly came through the gate.
Jakob Koelpin, former quality-assurance engineer
The largest gap came at a rainy evening match in May: the app recorded 2,106 visits, while the club’s turnstiles registered 811 entries. Across the 14 games, the club reported 61,200 digital visits; gate records totalled 42,774. Koelpin said the software did not create names or personal profiles, but counted repeated device signals as separate audience events.
Payments under review
Morrowgate Metrics spokesperson Samuel Helppolainen said the platform was designed to estimate attendance when scans were interrupted, and that customers were told the figures could include estimates. He disputed Koelpin’s description of test data as fabricated attendance, saying the company was checking whether the dashboard displayed the distinction clearly. The firm has paused new installations while its engineers examine the counting routine.
Tainan Harbour Rovers said it used the figures provided by its supplier and did not knowingly submit false attendance totals. The club’s manager, Angela Majeský, said it would return any money shown to have been wrongly claimed, but argued that its public grant application relied mainly on youth training and field maintenance, not match crowds.
The city sports office said its payment freeze applies only to the club’s next facility instalment, not to its operating budget. It will compare the app’s records with ticketing and gate data before deciding whether earlier grants or sponsor invoices need correction. Morrowgate’s software is also used at three other venues, the company said, though it has not identified them.
Koelpin said he went public after learning that the platform’s audience totals were still being presented as verified counts. Tainan’s sports office expects to publish its review by 15 December. Until then, the club’s planned lighting upgrade is on hold, and sponsors have asked for revised attendance figures before renewing their deals.
