About three weeks ago, I received an e-mail (I forget from whom) saying I could get a free laptop. Okay…I’ll bite. Well, 5 minutes later, after going through a bazillion offers for online degrees, insurance quotes, magazine subscriptons, etc., etc., I gave up. Today, I received an e-mail from a well-known department store saying I’d won a $500 shopping spree, but first…well, another endless list of offers. Okay, I tried again, but again gave up. Have you had similar e-mails, completed responding to the list of offers, and actually gotten the big prize? I wonder if there are other strings attached.
Wow, now I see why companies bother to send those things.
You are not getting email from famous companies. You are getting fake email from spammers. You have now told them that you are naive and your email address is good. That is not a good thing. The only prize is getting to be labelled “sucker.”
Some contests are legit, but that process usually starts when you visit the website on your own, because it’s a place where you like to shop or because you saw the contest advertised on TV or in a magazine.
My daughter won a whole Bratz doll collection from the K-Mart website a few years ago. The stuff came in a box the size of a refrigerator – six dolls, every accessory you could think of, plus four kid-size sleeping bags.
She’s 40, but she had fun giving the stuff away.
But mostly she gets spammed. 
That is generally the idea but I do believe some of the offers are legitimate if you read them to the letter and they come from real if sleazy marketing companies but the restrictions on getting the top prize is so severe that only an obsessive-compulsive person with superior project management skills could ever qualify. I am quite sure that most of them would send you a laptop or an Ipod if you somehow managed to survive their challenge. They would probably welcome that because it provides evidence that they aren’t a scam yet only a few die-hards could ever qualify.
I actually read through a free Ipod offer last week as an academic exercise. They offered a free Ipod for anyone that just fulfilled 9 easy requirements consisting of various marketing exercises with major companies. If you read the offer carefully, you will see that the bold and easy requirements of things like filling out a survey are just Stage One and that can only account for three of the nine requirements. After that, they offer no guarantees. Stages 2 and 3 get much harder and they will not promise that you can get past those stages without spending significant money sometimes like in the thousands for home siding.
Assuming you manage to meet the requirements to the letter, there is a strict and aggressive deadline for sending in your extensive paperwork. They will void the entry if even one company is late or provides insufficient documentation.
All of these types of things are a huge waste of time and potentially money even if it is theoretically possible to win something. An (additional) job could have earned you the same reward in less time and hassle and it has an actual guarantee of success.
There are legit websites that offer contests from reputable companies. I love entering and have won alot of stuff. Visa gift cards, makeup, lots of hair stuff, etc. Any major magazine website usually has contests to enter. It is fun and people do win. It just may take awhile.