A group of con artists rigged promotional sweepstakes throughout the 1980s | Hacker News Reader

A group of con artists rigged promotional sweepstakes throughout the 1980s

newyorker.com

85 pointsfortran7735 comments

I remember entering a few car raffles in shopping centres years ago. Each time it was stated the winners would be advertised in a particular newspaper on a particular date.

In every case on that date there was a notice saying the draw was postponed to a later date.

On checking the new date, a further postponment date was listed. this was repeated about three times until simply nothing was printed in the newspaper..

so now i treat all car raffles as scams.

They kind of all are scams. It was how they got people's information preinternet. Usually the fine print will tell you they aren't even giving the car away. The only person I know who won one of those things was very greasey. Had his dirty hands all over a lot of local businesses giving favors getting favors etc. They let his wife film a commercial for pay too lol.

Recently on HN, we had this submission which might be of interest to you:

"Why nobody ever wins the car at the mall": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31971858

Surprisingly, a friend of mine actually won the car from a sweepstakes, a couple of years ago. He lives in Poland though (and that's where the sweepstakes took place)

I've always assumed things like this are rigged by default from the start. Even on the hyper-local level, stuff like raffles to raise funds for the volunteer fire department. Friends or family of the organizers seem to always win.

I helped run conventions for the construction industry; we had a couple of shows where we had a raffle with prizes including a fancy pickup truck. It was amazing: the biggest prizes were always won by people who were directly related to members of the Board of Directors of the organization.

One of the big money makers for that org was "affinity group" insurance; they partnered up with a big insurance company to offer the members discounted, custom branded insurance and bonding (which was almost always required for the projects the members were bidding on, big business expense for them). Shockingly, that program ran OK for a couple years until one of the Board member's companies blew a job and somehow wiped out the entire insurance fund. As far as I ever figured it out, his company subcontracted with itself, defaulted and claimed a massive "performance bond" payment.

Friends and family of the organizer probably buy a lot of tickets, too.

Disproportionately so?

The families of Girl Guides generally end up buying a lot of Girl Guide cookies.

Yes.

The way it works is they get donated prizes, print 20k tickets, give out 10k to friends and family to sell, who sell about half and buy the rest themselves, and then someone rolls up with a donation to cover the rest of the cost and they give them a giant ball of leftover tickets.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but a personal appeal from a family or friend is about the only thing that would get me to enter one of those.

Who else would? I've never bought a raffle ticket. The friends and families of the beneficiaries are probably the only people even entering the raffle in the first place.

I think that's why lotteries are generally either illegal or run by the state. The temptation to rig them is just too high.

I'm pretty sure raffles are usually illegal, but ignored by law enforcement, like office sports pools.

In my town you need a permit to run a raffle, even for a school PTA event. But it's never audited or anything.

There's only a handful of licenses given out to lotteries over here, and they have to donate a big percentage of their revenue to charity. Which is probably fine by them, I'm sure there's a lot of shady business and tax write-offs happening there.

But either way, things are more regulated over here (Netherlands).

They decriminalized online gambling recently though; the big companies swooped in and started massive ad campaigns, which they're now trying to get in check.

Even if these things are all above board, gambling, lotteries and sweepstakes are massive money makers.

Idk man I won a rifle at a local firehouse raffle.

I mean my friend worked there, but also, I can imagine the only people entering the raffle are family and friends of people working there lol

That’s at a different level, with prizes in the 2-3 digits it’s not enough to attract the con artists and their schemes.

Another famous example of this is McDonald's Monopoly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald%27s_Monopoly#Fraud However, this fraud occurred in the late 90s instead, which is presumably why it's not mentioned in the article, which focuses on an earlier time period.

There's an HBO docuseries called McMillion$[0] based on the story.

[0] https://www.hbo.com/mc-millions

Promotional contests seem like a logical thing to wind-up rigged. Contest holder have little incentive to make them honest and so little incentive for security. And who else would care a lot and be able to enforce greater security?

During my university years, I've personally seen the "judging process" of a photography contest for a university newspaper.

The participants were primarily judged on how interesting they appeared, how their blogs and Facebook pages looked like, and what people they knew.

To me, it seemed like the judges of the contest saw it as a chance for networking, rather than a time to compare photographs honestly.

that's really sad when photography is really the easiest to handle in a blind selection process.

A photography contest is also most likely to be aware of the issues with an unphotogenic winner.

I guess it depends why you're running a contest... but I'd broadly disagree with your belief that "Contest holder have little incentive to make them honest".

(edit: Didn't mean to go on as long as I have in this comment, ah well.)

As a marketing person I've been involved in probably about a hundred competitions for companies ranging from tiny indie game devs to major tech companies and in every case we've been highly incentivised to make them honest, we make sure the Ts&Cs are published and fair (and rigidly followed by us), that nobody related to brands involved can win, that no human element is involved in affecting the winners chosen (unless there's something like a judging element), etc.

Highly motivated because any mistake could cause both legal risks and, if any bad publicity (or a lawsuit) were to come out of it, a business contract could be at risk that's worth far more than all the prizes combined. Even data security, we comply with GDPR and do everything reasonable to keep it secure both for privacy and for competition integrity.

And that's the case despite giveaways / competitions being probably less than 1% of both workload & budgets in my work.

If I were to run a company that dealt exclusively in organising contests, I would want to be even more careful and spend even more time involving lawyers (it's already a hassle complying with different laws and regulations on how competitions can be run in different countries btw, but my current small marketing agency complies for each country allowed to enter our often-worldwide competitions), not less.

Of course that's not to say there aren't people running competitions that are intended to scam in some way, and people running competitions incompetently, both in small businesses and even in huge globally famous ones. But if the purpose of the contest is marketing (which is the case for a lot of them), there's definitely often plenty of incentive to do them to the best of the organiser's ability.

Edit: to give a relavent example from just a few months ago, some colleagues of mine organised a promotion for a client. It was a sweepstakes hosted on a website, run over about a week, which involved various ways for participants to earn points e.g. by engaging with gaming streamers as they watch. At some stage while the competition was live, somebody on Twitter called out that the wording in the copy at the top of our page was somewhat ambiguous and didn't match the exact wording in the terms & conditions attached to the promo (which were written / updated to be specific to this one promo, it just wasn't perfectly worded) - such that it sounded from the headline that if you had the most points at the end of the week you WOULD win the grand prize, whereas the terms and conditions correctly described how we intended to pick the winner, a random draw in which each point gives you one entry (one chance to win), so that if you have the most points you have the best chance of being picked, but no guarantee.

Within two hours of the tweet, during which time two other people replied (one agreeing that it was misleading, one arguing it was fine) we had discussed it, emailed the company we'd partnered with for prizes in this competition asking if we could get two of the grand prizes rather than one while deciding that if for some reason they would say no we'd just buy the second one (they said yes), we changed the wording on the website header to more clearly describe the correct terms, and then tweeted that due to the potential for confusion we would be adding a second full grand prize package (about $1k of value iirc, mostly PC gaming hardware plus a special prize from a particular game) to be given to whoever gets the most points, while still having the same grand prize to be drawn in the manner described in the Ts&Cs. The positive response from the community was worth way more than the cost of the extra prize package.

Oh hey, good business.

Can I subscribe to your blog?

Not a fraud, but an interesting and tangentially related story that I imagine people born after 1980 may not know about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_free_flights_promotion

So this is not to speak about the rigged promotional games mentioned by OP but my Uncle won many large prizes in the 80's(corvette, boat, jaguar) through promotional giveaways. I remember my Dad told he his plan was to go to multiple places where a promotion was happening(he lived in LA and there were alot of them in that area) and filling out hundreds and even thousands of submissions to game the odds in his favor. It worked for him and I think others were doing this as well as now most promotions like this limit submissions to one entry per person(or family). And most car giveaways today are scams anyways just to get your info to marketers, but in the 80's things were different and people who knew about gaming probabilities could and did win many large prizes.

yes.. gosh - that's all in the past though.. this sort of thing wouldn't happen now.. right?

Father Ted had an episode about this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MiSsKqbPIMU

Donald Trump in the article's title seems a bit clickbaity. The story could stand on its own without focusing on Trump. The connection feels contrived. But interesting story nonetheless.

That last paragraph does rather bring it all back to him .....

I agreed until I read the part about Parker's mom being part of the team that investigated Trump for not renting to black people. Provides the motivation for Parker to be involved.

If you read the last paragraph, it seems Trump learned some tricks from mister "C.B.S." and even took them to the next level.

It's the New Yorker. They're not going to pass up an opportunity to bash Trump.

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