I received an envelope in the mail with a return address of Sweepstakes Clearinghouse. That sounds promising. Inside I found a letter stating that I had won a consolation prize. This was part of a 10 million dollar giveaway. My hope was that the consolation prize was 10 bucks or something equivalent.The only thing I seemed to have “won” was $400 credit vouchers on merchandise. The problem was that all the merchandise was priced above $400. Now I initially was excited to see some computers listed as merchandise that I could apply the vouchers towards. However my excitement waned as I saw the specs on the computers.
I think these computers were leftovers from some bargain bin. They only had a 3 month limited warranty. This must have been due to the fact that they were refurbished. I had to look in the fine print to see that. They only had 256 megabytes of RAM which is weak. The real kicker was that they had hard drives sized from 10 to 20 gigabytes.
At first I thought this might be some kind of joke. However the joke was on me. The more fine print I read, the more I did not like about this so called prize. Apparently I had to pay the difference between the merchandise value and my voucher. I would also be responsible to pay an undisclosed shipping and handling fee.
Now I do not know all the laws involved here. However something was definitely fishy. This company was trying to make me think I had won a prize. However they were actually trying to sell me some junk. There is supposed to be no purchase necessary in legitimate sweepstakes.
They did provide a business reply by mail envelope. So I wrote them requesting that they take me off their mailing list. Hey. At least it was mailed on their nickel. They should be happy I did not report them to some government agency that regulates sweepstakes. If I receive another mailing from them, I think I shall. Come on people. Start running a real business and stop with the scams.
