We can confirm that we have fraud prevention in place. If a user has a suspicious amount of likes or plays in a set amount of time, the likes and plays don't count and the beat goes on a 3 day cool off period to discourage ongoing fraud. It's one of the first things we put in place.
Exclusive like all sales count towards your ranking. Looking at our stats 35 people sold exclusives this past week so it does happen and we definitely count that.
Having family and friends buy your track over and over will only count as 1 sale. We take a lot of things in consideration here like ip address, frequency of sales for that track, etc.
If we suspect fraud, the beat gets flagged internally.