I actually gave away a Porsche 911. This was not a mall giveaway but a marketing experiment for my new startup: Flat 6 Club.
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.
In a world where the deck is stacked against most people regardless whether they "do the right things" like go to college hope of a chance windfall may be the only way to reach beyond their economic situation. $9.11 saved per month isn't going to ever buy a car, but it might win one and that's an easy value proposition to some people.
> But there are several operations that actually do give cars away such a Omaze, Diesel Brothers and many more.
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."
Don't worry, they've mostly moved on to selling crypto and NFTs for the most part... I haven't seen a car parked in my local mall for ages, there's a bitcoin ATM parked in that space now.
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.
It's pretty easy to be deceptive without needing to be false. A lot of advertising these days just use a mix of clever selective language, vague subjective terms, and omission of important information to avoid directly lying. It's pretty much normalized across all marketing at this point.
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.
> 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.
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.
Oprah's famous "You get a car! And you get a car! And everyone gets a car! " show landed each audience member who got a 'free' car with a $6000 tax bill.
> I don't think it's a gift tax, but ordinary income tax.
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.
In Australia, the thing called an "art union" used to be how to raise money for charity, and the prize was often a home, and they really exist, and people did win and live in them, and some of them were classics of the low spot of the 60s and 70s, shag-pile carpet, sunken entertainment pit, volcano-stone fireplace...
They still take place. I suspect the buildings have moved with the (architectural) times.
A friend of the family recently won a million dollar house in the hospital raffle. It was a house on the Gold Coast in Queensland, which he immediately sold. I think he might also have won $20,000 of gold bullion in another hospital raffle.
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.
> Patrick collects a rolodex of her (fake) data — full name, age, marital status — then tells her she has to be at least 28 to enter the drawing. “Tell your parent to call me,” he says, and hangs up.
> 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?
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?
> 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).
Welcome to the ecosystem of lead-generation, and the specialized marketing campaigns which drive business sales. One of my earliest technical jobs was writing the middle-ware systems that handled lead data, and tracked the sales conversion rates of the companies we served. As an aside, it is the worst job I ever had in any of my careers…
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. ;-)
I do the same thing with every cold-call power-sales phone call I get. I try to keep them on the line as long as possible, while paying as little attention as possible.
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.
> once a lead is in the ecosystem it can be resold to dozens of firms all over the world
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.
Well that's just disappointing. There is no car and it's all just smoke and mirrors to subject you to things like a timeshare promo and harvest your data? That's not even a good scam! It's just like countless others. The only creativity is the car and its not even theirs its just a loaner from some random dealership.
I recall as a younger child (teens, in the early to mid 2000s) there were these websites that allowed you to get all kinds of free stuff as long as you gave them your details. I, as someone who had only just discovered the internet (i.e. clueless) after emigrating to the Netherlands only a few years earlier and being in a relatively poor household, decided it was the most awesomest thing. I was signing up for all of these websites.
"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.
Realistically.. they have your name, date of birth, and where you lived as a kid. What's the worse that could happen? I don't think there's enough there to open a credit card under your name.
Because the fundamental economics of time shares are a scam. They are pitched as "ownership" but what they really are are perpetual rental contracts with no way out. (The rent is called "maintenance fees" but it doesn't matter what label you attach to it. It's a sum of money that you are obligated to pay year after year after year. If it quacks like rent...) And you even have to pay a hefty sum up front for the privilege of being obligated to rent a place once a year forever.
Honestly I find it kind of a shame because there are places in the world I would actually love to own/rent a regular consistent shareable space in, but it's basically impossible to do, without it being a scam, unless you have a bunch of well-off friends who want roughly the same thing as you.
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).
There are other equally shady fronts for this activity. I made the mistake of giving my name and number a person running one of those "raffles" at an NHL arena. I was deluged with time share spam calls for weeks afterwards. I should've known better as the team owner made his money marketing for AOL.
really hate these vulture like slime tactics to go after desperate and gullible people. it just brings tears to my eyes thinking of how shameless people are and how little they think about the after math of their actions. ex) crypto
It seems like this could be weaponized if you filled out a lot of these with the names, emails, phone numbers and other details of people you particularly dislike.
They'll never get out of those shady grey market crm systems..
This idea has existed for decades with magazine and tape/CD subscriptions. Bonus points were given if you picked hard core pornography or new age as the subscription of choice.
Gave me smile because I have a little anecdote that happened recently.
My friend showed up for a B-day party, and after some time invited me and few other friends to have a look at his new car. I was thinking he must have gotten a raise at work, because the car was brand new Volvo V40, which is above average expensive in my country and also our income bracket.
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.
It sounds like they're raking in a lot from this, so you'd kinda think they'd be best off actually giving away a car like, once every 5 years. To literally never give out the thing they're advertising seems like playing with fire. (The actual supposed big prize—after you jump through a lot of other hoops—is $100k, but same deal.)
In Slovakia, there was a sweepstakes of sorts (required some skills) where the main prize was a car. Which in fact turned out to be a loan of the said car for three months.
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.
[+] [-] 0xC0ncord|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shon|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TehCorwiz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sschueller|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://gleam.io/guides/no-purchase-necessary
[+] [-] scoot|3 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] oneoff786|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] United857|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] winternett|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kukx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Frost1x|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] raisedbyninjas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dathinab|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiph|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] onion2k|3 years ago|reply
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/oprah-gives-away...
[+] [-] nulbyte|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ggm|3 years ago|reply
They still take place. I suspect the buildings have moved with the (architectural) times.
[+] [-] SkeuomorphicBee|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] andrewstuart|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ungamedplayer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saghm|3 years ago|reply
> 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?
[+] [-] kristopolous|3 years ago|reply
In totally legitimate businesses we've set ages around there just to avoid the hassle and bs.
It works beyond any reasonable expectation
[+] [-] Railsify|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IncRnd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] audozeawayy|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] aninteger|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] Joel_Mckay|3 years ago|reply
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. ;-)
[+] [-] lelanthran|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jacquesm|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] c3534l|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quickthrower2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MonkeyMalarky|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lapser|3 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] jeromegv|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulgb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lisper|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stormbrew|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] Hnrobert42|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rkagerer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bink|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ezekiel11|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shrubble|3 years ago|reply
A fascinating movie... https://www.magpictures.com/thequeenofversailles/
[+] [-] walrus01|3 years ago|reply
They'll never get out of those shady grey market crm systems..
[+] [-] koolba|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vondro|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] normac2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WesolyKubeczek|3 years ago|reply
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.