I just started a 90 day challenge, and noticed that on the second day of the challenge, a participant ’earned’ 25,000 coins, and of course took a big lead over us slow pokes.
Is it even possible to earn 25,000 coins in one day? By speed reading, perhaps? Flipping through pages as fast as possible?
This doesn’t seem like a very effective way to acquire a language…
Yes, I agree. Every challenge group has a cheater or two, who acquires coins at some unnatural robot-like rate. You’re not alone in noticing this.
My highest number of coins in a single month was 70,000 approx. At that time I had recently started LIngQ and was challenging myself to learn as much as possible in 3 languages simultaneously in a 90-day marathon (“insane.”) I already had plenty of vocabulary learned elsewhere, so I went ahead and created lessons to auto-LingQ long lists of known vocabulary (lists of most frequent words, etc.) and marked known words as known, one by one. Then I did the same for English, to build cred in case I wanted to help others with English. So that racked up a lot of points really fast. I discovered serendipitously that I was at the top of a few challenges for a day or two, but others passed me up quickly and left me flabbergasted. 
The best learners probably won’t have higher numbers than others, but progress in actual language learning is where the benefit lies.
Good luck!
I’m pretty late here, but until recently I’d assume he’s cheating.
But, I personally have gone through vocabulary occasionally and found hundreds of words I forgot to mark as known that I already knew through other means.
After months of not going through vocab I can find hundreds. Marking many of them leads to thousands and thousands of coins added that I would have gotten over the course of months had I not forgotten to mark them as known.
I still have dozens of pages with hundreds and possibly even thousands of words I haven’t marked as known in my vocabulary.
For example, I somehow haven’t until today marked the simplest Russian words like “с” (with) and “один” (one) as known until today.
My guess is they joined the challenge and decided it was time to catch up on hundreds of words they forgot to mark.
Or, maybe that’s just an issue I have…
I noticed this. They’re scoring coins using listening however the amount of listening they do was like days in a day. A leader on the spanish 90 day hardcore challenge boards riezz1 has 180 something hours of listening in 7 days. Its not humanly possible.
I may be mistaken, but I seem to recall there’s a coin bonus for listening that they recently introduced. that might explain part of it.
As for me, I just ignore the leaders. All I’m concerned with is getting to the milestones that the system dictates for the challenge. Once I’ve done that, I pretty much consider that I’ve “won”.
Ahah don’t know if it possible but we have the same in japanese. A guy who said he is not fluent, but he have done, in only two years, almost 3700 hours of listening and 30 Millions of words read.
He is at 10000 coins per day. Every.Single.Day. Since 2 years. I don’t think it’s fake, it’s just impressive. He must be an hard worker.
But I’m sad I can’t block him because he fkd up every single learderboard 
So 25000 in two days is possible if it’s a new guy or someone like him. Some people doesn’t need to work, or have time alone to learn a language.
Even when I used LingQ 3 hours a day I’d only get around 10k. And that was after making a lot of lingqs and adding a lot of new words
Preamble: I am not on a challenge, so don’t complain about me 
It is not necessarily that the person got 25k coins just to “win the challenge”.
There is a very legitimate reason why someone can gain so much - and more - coins very rapidly.
For example I am pretty fluent in English (C1-C2 level), and I want to enlarge my vocabulary further. Given my vocabulary is already quite extensive, sifting through the dictionaries to find the words that I don’t yet know is infeasible. So I signed up for LinQ today, for it has implemented the idea of how to quickly identify the words you know and don’t know - just show the person a page of text and let them read it and mark the words they don’t know. However, just to identify the words I don’t know, I don’t have to peruse the entire page, I only need the skim through the words that are highlighted blue - the ones that were never shown to me before. Scanning a page that way takes like 15 seconds at most. In that manner I was able to zoom through tens of thousands of words and populate “known words” with 6k entries in less than 2 hours, gaining close to 70k coins. And by the time I am done sorting words, I will probably have few hundread thousand coins acquired in just a few days (And then probably won’t acquire a single coin for like ever cuz I am just going to sort through the words I marked unfamilliar or not clearly prominent in my head and export them into other tools for practicing)
We increased the number of coins you earn for listening. It was previouly quite low, now it rewards you better for listening.
Of course that isn’t the reason someone earned 25,000 coins in a day - I imagine that’s because they marked very very many words as Known. Ultimately it’s up to each user to decide how they use LingQ to learn, so it should be expected that some users seem to earn coins much faster than others.
I think a good way to improve those challenges is to create categories of competitors. For instance, 0-1000 words, 1-4000, 4-8, 8-14 and etc. So everyone in each category will be able to reach the top. As you know, gathering coins on top level is much harder. Besides, most cheaters will remain in low brackets.