Foursquare is a game to be played with yourself and with your friends, and was designed to encourage you to get out and explore your city, helping you discover new and interesting things about the world around you. Sure, you can cheat, but that's kind of like stealing Monopoly money from the bank in a game with your friends. You'll "win", but you're totally missing the point. We'll try our best to detect cheating and not reward that kind of behavior, but we're not going to get draconian about it. Ultimately, if you want to lie to your friends, that's your problem.

Getting businesses to give rewards to foursquare users was NOT a use case that was contemplated when the original game mechanic was built. But business owners were so excited about the engagement that foursquare users had with their business, that "mayor specials" started popping up organically. The demand for this kind of functionality was so great that it was built into the product, but it was not something that was there (or even contemplated) originally. Recognizing mayors was an obvious way to add rewards onto the existing game mechanic, but there are flaws with this approach. First, it doesn't scale very well, as there is only one mayor per venue. This isn't very useful for large retailers who have many customers. And it's also not great for users because as foursquare gets more popular then mayorships get more competitive and more difficult to retain. Second, as the original poster notes, there's much more incentive to cheat if there are real rewards being offered.

But "mayor specials" aren't the only way for businesses to reward their foursquare customers. Retailers like Gap, American Eagle, Steve Madden, and f.y.e. are offering discounts to anyone who checks in. Jimmy Choo ran a "Catch a Choo" campaign in London, where a pair of shoes were running around London checking in to places, and if you "caught" them when they checked in you got a free pair of shoes. Gogo is offering a badge if you check in using their in-flight wifi on any number of flights. Restaurants like Kona Grill and AJ Bombers have hosted "Swarm Parties" (you get a "Swarm" badge on foursquare if >50 people are checked in at the same venue at a time) with special menus and prices to attract customers and get them to unlock a badge together. Another restaurant, B&O American Brasserie, offers discounts for checking in and bringing friends with you (the more friends, the bigger the discount). All of these are by definition rewards that you can only benefit from if you are where you say you are.

It's early days in the space, and there are still a lot of issues that no one has figured out yet, but people who dismiss foursquare because of how easy it is to "cheat" are kind of missing the point.

  58 23 * * * curl -u CELL:PASS http://api.foursquare.com/v1/checkin.json -d vid=VENUE

"Eventually I amassed a huge number of mayorships, spread among multiple accounts, including the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln Memorial, Stonehenge and the Taj Mahal"

http://www.krazydad.com/blog/2010/02/mayor-of-the-north-pole...

So basically I would hate it if they enforced stricter checkins, unless they could find a way to let bars, restaurants, etc. verify checkins through a quick scanner or something.