5 ms·

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

85 points by fortran77 4y ago

joe_the_user 4y ago
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?
- swores 4y ago
  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.
  - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
    Oh hey, good business. Can I subscribe to your blog?
- acadapter 4y ago
  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.
  - em-bee 4y ago
    that's really sad when photography is really the easiest to handle in a blind selection process.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      A photography contest is also most likely to be aware of the issues with an unphotogenic winner.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
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.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
  Friends and family of the organizer probably buy a lot of tickets, too.
  - hackernewds 4y ago
    Disproportionately so?
    - fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
      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.
    - thombat 4y ago
      The families of Girl Guides generally end up buying a lot of Girl Guide cookies.
    - spoonjim 4y ago
      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.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      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.
- 4y ago
anonu 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Taniwha 4y ago
  That last paragraph does rather bring it all back to him .....
- jaywalk 4y ago
  It's the New Yorker. They're not going to pass up an opportunity to bash Trump.
- joncrane 4y ago
  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.
- giarc 4y ago
  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.
neonate 4y ago
https://archive.ph/vTgQq https://archive.ph/vTgQq
Sniffnoy 4y ago
Another famous example of this is McDonald's Monopoly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald%27s_Monopoly#Fraud 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.
- voxadam 4y ago
  There's an HBO docuseries called McMillion$[0] based on the story. [0] https://www.hbo.com/mc-millions https://www.hbo.com/mc-millions
basicplus2 4y ago
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.
- ThePadawan 4y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31971858
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    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)
- crabbygrabby 4y ago
  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.
verisimi 4y ago
yes.. gosh - that's all in the past though.. this sort of thing wouldn't happen now.. right?
sjcsjc 4y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_free_flights_promotion
subsubzero 4y ago
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.
vgeek 4y ago
Father Ted had an episode about this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MiSsKqbPIMU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MiSsKqbPIMU

85 points by fortran77 4y ago

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?

swores 4y ago
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.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
  Oh hey, good business. Can I subscribe to your blog?
acadapter 4y ago
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.
- em-bee 4y ago
  that's really sad when photography is really the easiest to handle in a blind selection process.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    A photography contest is also most likely to be aware of the issues with an unphotogenic winner.

MichaelCollins 4y ago

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.

fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
Friends and family of the organizer probably buy a lot of tickets, too.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  Disproportionately so?
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
    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.
  - thombat 4y ago
    The families of Girl Guides generally end up buying a lot of Girl Guide cookies.
  - spoonjim 4y ago
    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.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    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.
4y ago

anonu 4y ago

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.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Taniwha 4y ago
That last paragraph does rather bring it all back to him .....
jaywalk 4y ago
It's the New Yorker. They're not going to pass up an opportunity to bash Trump.
joncrane 4y ago
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.
giarc 4y ago
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.

neonate 4y ago

https://archive.ph/vTgQq https://archive.ph/vTgQq

Sniffnoy 4y ago

Another famous example of this is McDonald's Monopoly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald%27s_Monopoly#Fraud 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.

voxadam 4y ago
There's an HBO docuseries called McMillion$[0] based on the story. [0] https://www.hbo.com/mc-millions https://www.hbo.com/mc-millions

basicplus2 4y ago

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.

ThePadawan 4y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31971858
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  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)
crabbygrabby 4y ago
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.

verisimi 4y ago

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

sjcsjc 4y ago

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

subsubzero 4y ago

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.

vgeek 4y ago

Father Ted had an episode about this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MiSsKqbPIMU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MiSsKqbPIMU