Why nobody ever wins the car at the mall (2018)
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
Yes, we wanted something in return, in this case, we wanted you to buy a t-shirt or start a subscription (merch+content+events), which gives us essentially all the same info, which would enter you in a sweepstakes to win the car. We also wanted to promote the club, which we did.
We researched it and contracted a sweepstakes company who helped us run the sweepstakes legally.
In the end, we gave away the car to a very nice man and his wife, who we flew in from Minnesota to San Diego for the giveaway event.
Some people did think it was a scam.
But there are several operations that actually do give cars away such a Omaze, Diesel Brothers and many more.
There’s a model there based on the new post-search world we live in that has to do with high engagement increasing Return On Ad Spend and other AdTech voodoo.
No doubt there are lots of scams but there are also real winners out there.
We’ve only given away 1 car. We learned a ton.
I decided to kill the monthly subscription after we gave away the car because we grossly underestimated the amount of up-front ad spend required to achieve a good ROAS and I knew we wouldn’t be giving away another car for a long time.
The biggest surprise to me was hearing from people that were sad that we killed the paid membership/giveaway program.
This was $9.11/mo for membership and occasional swag drops and automatic entry into our next giveaway —whenever that might be. I communicated personally with some of these folks.
The gist of what I learned was that for $9.11/mo, people enjoyed the hope that they may one day win a 911. We literally had people beg us to bring it back. This is probably the same happiness that a lottery ticket brings to many people. It’s not really that they expect to win. As long as someone wins, they’re buying some hope, some excitement… a dream.
If this doesn't work out moving to the probability of a windfall maybe desperation but it's not smart.
If people believe this is their only hope that's sad and we should guide them to make better decisions.
Start an internet payment, space exploration, electronic vehicle, tunnel boring, or direct brain-computer interface company.
The mean ROI on a bachelors in physics is probably the highest in STEM.
Apparently, they're also popular on Wall Street
Mandatory SMBC link: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
Historically, the most successful examples in each of those industries have a physics degree. I cannot explain the causation.
Elon Musk also drives the mean for physics majors way up.
It was supposed to be a joke, which maybe people missed, about how Elon Musk was a physics major and how mean values on power law distributions are distorted greatly by the outliers.
So I have n clue what the median is, but I assume, like all income and wealth distributions it follows a power law distribution.
My PhD was sure a very nice to have, but never a life changer.
Would I do it again? Probably yes because of the tremendous joy research brought me (and free time for parties!).
Did I recommend it to my kids? No, they are better off with me specific studies.
I got a BS in math and physics, then continued for a PhD in physics. Today I work for a company that makes measurement equipment. We have engineers from most of the traditional disciplines, but they tend to be silo'd, and happy to avoid math and theory. Unavoidably, understanding (and proving) how the product works involves a combination of mechanical, electronics, data processing, statistics, and so forth. My long term role is to be the person who understands how the product works, not only acquiring domain knowledge but creating it.
The deal is that physics isn't an exclusive guild, and there are people in other disciplines with similar inclinations, but they're as rare as physicists. So I can't tell you why you need a physicist at the exclusion of any quantitative engineer with 30 years of experience. I can't promise that you'll get rich at it. I just try to help people and learn new things.
Of the 100 or so people in my MSCi physics degree programme there were:
About 40 who went on to do PhDs ... of which about 30 are now academics, the rest went pretty evenly into the categories below, just a few years later
20 went on to some kind of elite professional services: investment banking, consulting, law or into large corporate management graduate programmes
10 are teachers, tutors, or have some other allied role
10 are civil servants or work for think tanks or other NGOs
20 have jobs in tech in various capacities
Wait until the winds of the economic climate change their direction again; until this moment, celebrate and post such texts on HN that will become bad advice.
I just think there isn't nearly enough jobs in the field compared to the amount of people who are graduating with math degrees. There's only 27,700 actuaries in the US - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/math/actuaries.htm
They are a libertarian thinktank, so take it with a grain of salt, but it's a lot more data than we've had in this thread so far.
TLDR: Engineering pays, computers pay almost as much, art and music are usually a net negative (over 42 working years).
Looking at math, 88% of graduates will earn a 42-year ROI of <=$1,000,000, which means most of them are earning an additional $24k/year on top of what they could've expected to earn without a degree ("counterfactual earnings": https://freopp.org/how-we-calculated-the-return-on-investmen...). Only 3% of math majors should expect a negative ROI (i.e., they would've been better off NOT getting their degree). By comparison, 68% of art & music majors will have a negative ROI on their degree.
If so, I don't necessarily agree. College is an expensive (dollars and time) proposition that rarely pays off. Trade schools, boot camps, etc. are probably better investments for many people. And frankly, saving your money and hoping for a windfall is probably smarter than going to college unless you have a very clear idea already of what you want to study and what career you want to go into afterward.
College is not an automatic positive. For a lot of people, their degree ends up not being worth their student debt.
Or maybe I misunderstood the "it can only improve your chances" part... like maybe you meant "it can improve your chances, but only in certain fields", vs "it can only improve your chances (not worsen them)"?
There are a whole lot of companies out there fishing for vulnerable people, in all shades from legally shady businesses to pretty much all ad and credit companies.
We had a lot to learn about successful execution on the marketing side so the actual number of entries was well less than 100k.
A properly motivated individual may be able to automate finding first-timers like us, and entering via sending postcards, and actually have an excellent chance of winning.
Reminds me of Lazlo in “Real Genius” ;)
From the article: "There are other types of car giveaways run by more legitimate parties (charity raffles, event promotions) that do deliver the goods — but if you win, you’re liable to pay a hefty gift tax."
There's a certain breed of huckster that even if they designated a prize winner, it would be one of their family members. The most important part of managing scams is to expose them, and cite the names involved so that they need to pick a different line of work.
Or we make these scams illegal. Sending scammers to jail is much more effective than finger wagging.
Public shaming is much cheaper
I'm not saying that you should only jail people if it's cheaper but society cannot afford to incarcerate everybody who commits a crime, not only for the money but the effect it has on ex-cons who can't find work and spiral downwards; families growing up with parents in prison; hardening a soft criminal by jailing them with hard criminals.
Sadly, it is much more complicated than we want to admit and there aren't many good alternatives that I have seen. Tends to be quite polarised "never jail people" or "always jail people".
So we already have that soft on crime reality when it comes to scamming and false advertising. The average person believes the government is far, far more active than it really is in this type of issue. Crime pays and most criminals get away with it.
Even if it is slightly a grey area, you then have a lawyer fight which costs a ton of cash and then even if found guilty, what are you realistically going to do to someone who pretended that you could win a car to market their timeshares? life in prison at $100K/year to the tax payer?
These sorts of sales tactics should just be illegal and criminal. If your sales pipeline requires exploiting human cognitive failures (ie., "boiler room sales tactics") then you're scamming people. A business exists to provide a service people want, not to scam people into something they dont. The gov. provides limited liability protections to businesses, not to scams.
I think we're far enough into our understanding of human psych now to say "here are the fault lines", if your business principally (, systematically, essentially, ...) uses them to make money, it's illegal.
I think the point was that these scams wouldn't exist if the laws were better.
Yes, because their targets will be reading Hacker News.
The Nigerian Prince scam still works, and every person in the world has heard of it by now.
> and cite the names involved so that they need to pick a different line of work.
I don't think they value their public image half as much as you seem to think. But you're on to something.
What if the alternative line of work they had to pick was cleaning toilets at a federal penitentiary, or stamping license plates, or maybe breaking gravel at a re-socialization camp somewhere in Siberia?
To my knowledge an ad doesn't have to correspond to the visual which is why a lot of ads visually sell or imply sex in some way, meanwhile whatever there selling isn't. Clothing is notorious for this. Sticking a car there just catches your eye like an attractive person might to lure you in. It's then up to the passerby to read the details and fine print of what's actually being sold.
I don't think it's a gift tax, but ordinary income tax. A coworker won a living room sofa set on a game show, and the staff were waiting with a 1099 for her as soon as she stepped off the stage. The IRS says you need to pay tax based on the fair market value, but the shows will list the prize at it's full retail price.
So if you should happen to (and you won't) win the Acura, you'll owe 25% or more on it. Plus any state income tax. I'm not sure when the IRS actually wants their money, but a safe assumption would be "soon". Perhaps by the next quarterly estimated-tax date.
They still take place. I suspect the buildings have moved with the (architectural) times.
Correct. Prize winnings are taxed at your ordinary income tax rate. The gift tax applies to gifts, not prize winnings, and even then, the giver pays it, if applicable.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/oprah-gives-away...
With a 25% tax rate and car value of $28,500; to make it a tax-free gift Oprah should've paid an additional $9,500.
There’s a great YouTube view about exactly this by Stand Up Maths if you want to go down a rabbit hole.
Is it simply counted on top of (added to) your existing income, and therefore progressive?
If I'm unemployed, with no income at all, would I pay very little to no tax on such a gift? Or gifts are a special case with a separate rate?
And off topic but my brother won a years supply of Kentucky Friend Chicken in the footy tipping..... and he is a vegetarian. Imagine that - you win the sacrifice of 365 chickens for your skill in picking footy teams. KFC gave him 50 x $50 vouchers.
And I once spent two full days entering every possible online competition I could find. You can guess how much I won.
Here is Australia in the 1980's it was common to find free competition tickets that you could enter in fish and chip shops. For a joke, a friend entered another friend, who won an all expenses paid trip for two to Europe, without knowing they had been entered.
I personally during the source of my many years, have won precisely nothing ever.
I think it's safe to say he's in Australia.
We get the car parked in the shopping centre with big "WIN THIS CAR" signs. Entry is $5-10 per ticket though, so it seems feasible there's actually a winner somewhere along the way (My assumption is a Mustang appears in a few shopping centres at once and one is ultimately given away, for example).
(Carn the Lions)
Up the Dons!
No one says 'footie' in Australia. We say 'footy'.
> Her “dad” (our writer, Conor) gives it one last try. Patrick tells Conor that in order to win the car, he has to go to a local Great Destinations office and attend a 90-minute timeshare presentation.
This is the only part I still don't understand after reading the article. Why do they limit this to people at least 28? Is this just a way of filtering out people unlikely to have enough money to scam into spending on a timeshare, or are they avoiding some esoteric regulation that somehow blocks them from marketing to younger people?
Anecdotally, I had 20000x more money at 22 than 28. If I remain employed for the rest of the year I might be on par by the end of it. Graphing my income over the last 10 years would look like a memory leak
In totally legitimate businesses we've set ages around there just to avoid the hassle and bs.
It works beyond any reasonable expectation
Even if this outfit is fully owned and operated by a scuzzy timeshare company, do they really make enough money to justify the $1500/~=22 marks?
The article only mentions people being contacted by the timeshare company, but I wonder if they might sell the info as a secondary revenue stream, especially given the waiver which claims to override federal do-not-call lists.
How much would one packet of contact info+metadata sell for, if the subject has signed on to be contacted by advertisers?
LendingTree.com was charging $70 per "lead", this was 2018 or so, not sure how prices have changed since then. However this was on the high end, zillow.com, also sold leads but for quite a bit lower (although you got what you paid for).
I was wondering the same, but one thing that helps the math in their favor a bit was that the 22 was in one hour on a weekday afternoon. I imagine it’s higher on weekends and evenings.
Even better is just not buying one and just renting one a usually little more than the maintenance fee.
In general, you are never dealing with a single company:
1. An advertiser operating on Radio/TV/Web/Email to drive specific consumers to a company sales lead funnel
2. A marketer running a consumer data collection form (Web/1-800-Call-center/SMS/IVR) to sort which campaign is best suited for the potential consumers
3. A marketing data-broker cross-referencing and scrubbing user data to filter bogus/old/duplicate customer leads, and ascertain the time critical nature of which campaigns to deploy new leads into
4. A company sales campaign manager monitoring lead conversion rates between the data-broker and the company sales platform (often another web-form/call-center/IVR/spammer/SMS). In general, most professional firms will drop campaigns under a 17% success rate, but spammers are happy even under 0.056% terrible rates (where old lead data goes after everyone else gave it a hard pass).
5. A sales conversion success rate lead price adjustment by push back from the company campaign to the data-broker (higher % sales per lead pool mean higher prices). The data-broker also cross checks the conversion rate for a given lead pool, and will adjust the quality/price per lead by comparing many company campaigns to keep everyone honest.
While many firms will honor a Do Not Call record flag by law, once a lead is in the ecosystem it can be resold to dozens of firms all over the world. It was also common for call-centers to leech call lists to resell to other data brokers, which would predictably have terrible conversion rates equivalent to spam email.
I should probably mention the data-broker was also a social networking site owner, and this was the primary fiscal motivation behind running the platform. ;-)
Put the phone on speaker, turn down the volume a little, and carry on working on my computer.
I feel that the only way to end spam (email and phone), is to take up as much time of the spammer as possible.
If all 25m recipients of an email scam replied with the intention to drag it out as long as possible, the scammer will never identify those who actually fell for it.
If all 25m recipients of a phishing email responded with poisoned data, the target bank would quickly realise what was happening.
If everyone who ever receives a spam phone call kept the person on for 30m instead of dismissing the call in 5s, it would be unprofitable to make these calls.
In general, dropping the ROI on these techniques to negative would stop them.
While the number-filters on modern smart-phones are fairly good (origin spoofing is illegal), these devices still suffer from other problems like app lamer-ware stripping contact lists (is your "cloud backup" on by default?).
Hence the GDPR's 'legal basis for processing' requirement. If you did not obtain consent for that specific use then you don't have a legal basis for processing.
Accordingly, what percentage of people actually read those 5 page end-user-agreements before enabling cloud backup on their phone (about 1/3000 on average). ;-)
This is not correct. For instance:
Again, one is incorrectly assuming scammers care about your local laws in the first place, and present informal fallacy as an argument with little contextual relevance.
Given our uniquely crafted developer contact data was often injected into the data sets as a logic test, it was common practice to climb back up the delivery pipeline to identify the cheats and cons. ;-)
Besides, most of Netherlands IP blocks are already blacklisted on my routes for various theft-of-service scams including SIP hijacking attempts. i.e. your country rates in the top 5 nuisance traffic origins... congratulations.. I guess... ;-)
"Who cares!" I thought to myself. "What can they even do?! As long as I don't pay them anything it's fine!" I naively told my parents, who were just as naive around these issues. I got told off a few times, not because I was giving out my data to every company under the sun, but because random things were coming through the door.
I remember once a prominent pet food company sent out a sample cat food package. I didn't even like cats. Pets were frowned upon in our culture.
Needless to say, I'm some 15 years older now, and I regret every single form I was filling out back then. I realise that everything has vastly changed and systems change, but I can't help but feel somewhere some system still has my data, and it's only a matter of time before something wrong happens with it, if it hasn't already.
This kind of thing probably targets similar households. Poor people who are generally uneducated on these matters. It's sad that such thing isn't outlawed.
> A timeshare (sometimes called vacation ownership) is a property with a divided form of ownership or use rights. These properties are typically resort condominium units, in which multiple parties hold rights to use the property, and each owner of the same accommodation is allotted their period of time. Units may be sold as a partial ownership, lease, or "right to use", in which case the latter holds no claim to ownership of the property. The ownership of timeshare programs is varied, and has been changing over the decades.
well actually... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax#Places_without_pr...
But yes, that's true about property taxes. But since that's a commonality between condos and otherwise-individually-owned property it doesn't really matter. In a condo you pay both, but if you own outright you only pay one. In a rental you're kinda paying both combined, because the owner pays property taxes and then presumably also tries to extract profit.
Anyways, I don't agree that condos are a scam in the same way that timeshares are, and I don't think a condo is just a glorified rental (though the one condo I have owned in my life had absurdly high fees that I regretted getting myself into) or a scam like timeshares are. I was just trying to explain what I though the GP meant.
Did you ever look HOA financial docs that details exactly what the HOA spent money on?
It was, unfortunately, just a very bad situation for the building, which was aging poorly from its origins as a low unit count high value building with a lot of expensive amenities, windows that couldn't handle changing climate, a parkade that needed deep structural work, having been built when asbestos was in vogue, and a population that was once wealthy but was now largely on fixed incomes and declining property value.
No one did anything wrong (except maybe a few attempts to fix the parkade in overly optimistic and superficial ways that required re-fixing at more expense later), it just wasn't worth condo fees ballooning well past my mortgage payments and it ended up costing well hundreds of $k to sell and doing so was one of the most stressful times of my life.
None of that means "condos are always bad". Just this one was a mistake.
If you mean what I said about HOA vs condo fees, I've only ever seen HOA used for detached homes or townhouses, where the common concerns are a lot less critical than in an apartment building (and so, from what I know, tend to be more frivolous). But maybe it's used differently elsewhere.
The main difference between a condo association and an HOA here is what kind of property is involved. But HOAs are also a relatively recent development here and aren't regulated as strongly so they vary more.
That obviously has a big impact on resell value - so much to the point that some timeshare owners can't give it away let alone sell it, because no one wants to be beholden to the maintenance fees.
Depending on specifics you even get partial ownership of the whole building and a seat on its management board. At least that’s how it works for my mom, they run the building like a co-op and there is no other owner than the people who own the apartments inside.
edit: a timeshare in comparison is kinda like buying an NFT of an apartment. It gives you the right (obligation) to use the place for a period of time every year
Most people think it's a pretty relevant difference. For one thing, if you occupy a place year-round, you can keep your belongings in it. That's a pretty significant feature for most people, which is the reason most people choose to live in a permanent domicile rather than moving every week. But different strokes for different folks I guess.
Most vacation destinations are somewhat seasonal. Maybe the most major cities with year round cultural activities, but not in places like beach and ski towns.
You can potentially have 52 "1-week-a-year" people fighting over the 16-20 weeks a year the location is most desirable, and maybe settling for lesser times, or just not using it that year. Hell, why not sell 60 memberships, knowing some will just punt in any given year?
Timeshare owners are generally not represented by a committee of other owners, the money does not go to things approved by them, and the company makes no promises about acting in the interest of timeshare owners.
So yeah, you are contractually obligated to pay fees for a space you can occupy is where they are similar. There's a reason that timeshares almost never appreciate, often being given away for free, where a condo tends to hold value or appreciate.
As a fun little bit of anecdata, newer buildings are always the worst with many leftover, teething issues and strata title can sometimes be heavily in debt. Old buildings can have huge amounts in the sinking fund and may elect to reduce yearly fees and rely on interest.
https://thehotelskills.com/different-between-time-share-and-...
2. If in some hypothetical world, you were unhappy with the fees, and you couldn't sell your condo, you can walk away from it anytime you want, and all you're out is the purchase cost of the condo.
3. You can't do that with the timeshare. You need to find another sucker to take the timeshare off your hands.
4. For what you get out of it, the cost of owning/renting a timeshare versus owning/renting a condo is horribly tilted against the timeshare.
5. Which is why intelligent people will pay a million dollars for a condo, but only idiots buy timeshares.
6. Which why you get screwed if you want to do #2, because of #3.
The reason people buy timeshares is because they are bad at math, bad at finances, and don't understand that they are getting fleeced.
Timeshares don't necessarily have to be shitty scams, it's entirely possible to design one that isn't a waste of money. But in practice, all of them are.
I'm sure that certain timeshares (no inflation adjustment with good governance) have aged really well, and some people that wanted access to specific locations were able to pickup timeshare rights for a song.
The problem is that the "benefit of hindsight" question requires you to compare other investments that have probably fared as well or better without the constraints/risks of typical timeshares.
Probably the closest you can come is buying or renting a place and then airbnb-renting it out most of the time, but then you're getting yourself into some legally grey areas most likely (plus becoming a landlord, which may be quite a lot of work and/or morally questionable in itself depending on your views).
A fascinating movie... https://www.magpictures.com/thequeenofversailles/
They'll never get out of those shady grey market crm systems..
Then it turned out he bought a new collar for his dog, and that the producer of the collar organized a prize lottery, where you could win a really nice backpack, and a car. And that my friend won the main prize, which was the brand new Volvo.
Now I know someone who won something really valuable, and also that these prize lotteries can sometime work.
On the other hand, my first laptop ever was a sweepstakes win in 2007. It wasn't a very good laptop, but it was an honest win.
Turns out, you can't win anything: https://youtu.be/DstR4mdG2MU
Yeah that fact is worse than there being no car.
I stopped entering comps though because it started to change from "give us your email for some marketing you can opt out of" to "enter with Facebook account where we can see everything about you and you have to share our post on your feed etc".
Pretty sure the UK / EU is better on making sure prizes are what they say they are, but the small print on competitions has got so much worse.
This is why there's usually either a criminal fine for false advertising or a class action lawsuit. It's probably better to find someone at the California AG who's interested in shutting down false advertising.
That’s disturbing. There is no way that’s possibly legally binding? Surely there can’t be a loophole this ridiculous in the Do Not Call law?
Your bank is absolutely permitted to call you regardless of you being on the DNC. You have an existing business relationship with them.
I mean—-tongue in cheek—-are you trying to illustrate that Safari actually goes above and beyond here by looping infinitely on a page that is about a scam that is essentially about an ad technique that loops you endlessly?
- https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22925225/super-bowl-ads-money-...
If you ever watch scam baiting videos, those Indian scammers share and sell the numbers the collect. If they can fall for the "Microsoft tech support" scam once, then they are likely to fall for the "Amazon refund" scam as well.
Social media companies have really clamped down over the past 5 years on any form of contact info scraping
Muricans are insane... Do this to me in françe I WRECK you in middle the mall in public taking some free palms in face :)
I really don't understand what people are complaining about, seems like a good deal to me...