The World Pencak Silat Championship held at OCBC Arena from 13 to 16 Dec did not go as smoothly as it should.
No, there was no serious injury or startling discovery of dishonesty. Instead, what happened was that the award ceremony was rudely interrupted by hoards of people, or “hunters” rushing into the stadium and looking for a special silver coin.
The ruckus was captured on video by Redditor u/hydroxideoh.
Source
The coin in question belongs to Sqkii, a promotions aggregating app. As part of their publicity game called #HuntTheMouse, the silver coin was hidden in the arena and whoever found it would be able to trade it for S$1,000.
In case you missed the news, Sqkii has hidden a golden coin somewhere in Singapore. Anyone who finds it can trade it for S$100,000 — that’s right, one little coin for 1-tenth of a million dollars.
Sqkii has also hid a number of silver coins worth S$1,000 each.
Combing the entire Singapore for the coin isn’t quite practical — unless you’re bored, jobless, and don’t mind lifting every lift-able street object up to look for that prized golden glimmer.
That’s why Sqkii releases daily clues on their Facebook page. So hunters won’t be busting their brains figuring out where to start looking.
On 15 December, Sqkii released a clue that pointed to a very obvious location. It was where the World Pencak Silat Championship was being held — OCBC Arena.
According to witnesses at the event, the coin hunters had made their way in during the awards ceremony. They haphazardly swept the area, with some even asking audience members to stand up so they could look under their seats.
Eventually, security stepped in and drove the intrusive crowd out of the arena. To express their frustration, the audience members started cheering as the crowd was being driven out.
Many online users were not happy with Sqkii for failing to consider the consequences when picking the location.
One Facebook user accused Sqkii of being “very very unprofessional”. Another remarked that the ruckus would have given a terrible impression of ourselves to the many international audience members and athletes.
Yet another said Sqkii gave no respect to the players, audience members and organisers of the Silat championship by inducing people to rush into the arena.
Sqkii was quick to notice public displeasure with its chosen hiding spot, and made an apology on Facebook.
It wrote that it had only intended to publicise the sport. This particular hunt was part of a collaboration with ActiveSG. Unfortunately, with the publicity came a lot of frustration from the people who actually wanted to watch the competition.
While many were critical of Sqkii, some said that the hunters should have practiced more restraint and been more respectful.
But it’s the kind of thing where if you don’t rush, someone else is — and then you’re just sitting there foolishly while the other person hones in on the thousand dollar prize.
So maybe you can’t really blame the hunters either. After all, as Singaporeans, we love all things free.
Ultimately, Sqkii had good intentions — promoting a less popular sport. We give them that. But hopefully, going forward, they will be more aware of the potential consequences of hiding a coin in a particular location.
Featured image from Sqkii and ActiveSg.
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