For years I have been bombarded with mail asking me to fill out forms and be “entered for our grand prize”. Of course I have never won any drawing including second and third prizes etc.
Fully aware that there are countless numbers of persons entering these drawings, I am wondering if they are on the up and up…and where do the drawings occur and who is responsible to prevent a breakdown of the rules and assure honesty?
If you’re talking about something like Publisher’s Clearinghouse, they do indeed choose a winner for their sweepstakes. Your chance of winning, however, is infinitesmally small.
I believe there are various laws governing sweepstakes, and they do require the prized be awarded (or be awarded if claimed – if you throw away the Coke cap with the winning entry, you’re out of luck and Coke gets to save the prizes for another contest). It’d probably be postal fraud if they didn’t abide by the rules.
really? I’ve never bought Coke through the mail before . . .
(sorry, sorry)
One key rule is that, in the case of any sweepstakes, you need not purchase the product in question to be entered. Though many (Publisher’s Clearinghouse is a prime offender) imply that in order to win (or in order to increase your chances of winning) you have to buy their product, it just ain’t so. Write to them demanding your “free game piece”, and they will be forced to oblige you.
Not that I’m questioning you, but I’ve always wondered… Is this a law that contest-makers have to follow? Or do they just do this to put the general public’s mind at ease that the whole thing isn’t rigged? I mean, it’s their money that their giving away, can’t they make up their own contest’s rules?
I have some experience with drawings conducted by a major oil company. I was one of two executive assisants for the marketing division of a line of motor oils. In our marketing group sweepstakes and drawings were handled differently.
Sweepstakes were usually handled by a service that we paid a flat or pre-arranged fee and they conducted the sweepstakes dealing with the entries, choosing the winner, notification and awarding of the prize.
Drawings we tended to handle “in house”. This would be for low to medium value items, for example a case of motor oil, a cap with logo, golf shirt, or remote control race car ranging on up to a small kid size battery operated car.
They would set the box of entries on my desk and tell me to notify the winner(s), award prizes and copy them. If it was a contest where there were several prizes, I started with the low prize and drew out a name, if it was properly filled out and legible they became winner of the cap. I would continue drawing tossing out illegible, incomplete or incorrectly filled out entries until all prizes were awarded. If I repeatedly pulled out the same name (the box was flagrantly stuffed) then I tossed all entries of that name. Frankly a complete and legible entry was harder to find than you would think.
If you want to win, print clearly, fill the form out completely and don’t flagrantly stuff the box.
Good Luck,
Abby
Just an anecdote here:
I was peripherally involved with a company that had a sweepstakes on thier website. Anyone who provided contact information was entered in a drawing to win “a chance to win $1,000,000.”
They actually did the drawing - the winner received a scratch-off lottery ticket.
An interesting take on this in Australia:
I don’t know if this is still the case (I never enter competitions), but when I was a kid, the breakfast cereal competitions always required entrants to send in tokens cut out from the side of the box (proof of purchase). There was always a note saying: “Residents of the state of South Australia need not send in the tokens”. So there was clearly a local law removing the need to purchase. To circumvent this (nearly), the cereal companies added another sentence to the note: “South Australian residents must submit a hand-drawn facsimile of the cereal box”. So there is always a loophole.
If a ticket is drawn written by someone more likely to be in a higher economic group (physicians, attorneys, corporate heads) or has an address such as Brentwood, Ca., Naples, Fl or Aspen, CO, …what prevents the selector of the winning ticket(s) from discarding that ticket and choosing a ticket of his choice?