Phishing

[crokett]

We went to the State Fair today. There was one booth that was offering a 125.00 gas card, chance to win a car, free vacation, etc. The catch was you filled out a form that asked for your vitals, salary range, how often you went on vacation. I watched the people filling out the form and wondered if they know that at best:

Their info was going to get sold to junk mail, telemarketers and other annoying people

At worst:
It was a scam to identify the rich people who aren't home a lot so they could be robbed.

[Ed62]

You have to remember that a crook has to make a living too.

Ed

[Thalermade]

In a local mall last year there was a car give-a-away. In the fine print on the entry form was a line that said something to the effect that by entering the contest you were giving the company permission to use your phone number and call you - superceding the No Call registry.

Of course you home phone number was required lnformation on the entry form.

Russ

[leehljp]

In 2000, my family and I went to the Mid-South Fair in Memphis and LOML along with one of my daughters filled out every form they could - including email addresses. Guess who got tons of spam and no prizes or winnings?

And they were warned BIG time. I never had to say "I told you so" because it was written all across my face every time they opened their email for the next 6 months!

[Pappy]

There is a company called "Promotions" that operates a lot of these 'contests'. Timeshares are one of the biggest clients.

[tfischer]

Yeah these are almost always timeshare deals.

The one I usually see says "register for a vacation". They don't say anything about a prize drawing, but everyone assumes it is. They're really signing up as "interested" in buying a timeshare, if they'd read the fine print...

-Tim

[cabinetman]

So David, tell the truth...how many did ya fill out?
.

[crokett]

So David, tell the truth...how many did ya fill out?
.

None. I did make the guy running the booth annoyed after I pointed out to several prospective customers what they were really signing up for.

[Alex Franke]

I used to work in the travel industry -- we used to do things like this all the time to get sales leads. We'd rank the responses by their likelihood to buy travel (e.g. yearly vacation, descent salary). We'd have a service verify the addresses and possibly the phone numbers against the databases (NCOA for example). We'd mail out different sets of offers and teasers based on how qualified the lead was and how they answered the questions (e.g. if they have kids, they'd get Disney stuff). In some cases our sales staff would cold call.

Many translated into sales. One similar cold call actually translated into a multimillion dollar ship charter.

The "chance to win" deal was always for real and complied with local law. Usually if it's something like a car, then a lot of businesses get together to ante up the give-away and gather the leads. Vacation give-aways were often provided by a cruise line, airline, hotel, tour operator, etc, sometimes for free and often at a very low rate, so that's what we'd usually give away. We had a lot of *very* happy winners, actually.

Edit: Oh, I should point out that we could often tell if the person was only interested in the give-away -- sometimes they'd even write things like "Only contact me if I won." They were entered into the drawings, of course, but we didn't spend a lot of money mailing to them. The cold-callers were often the newer salespeople and are very used to getting interrupted and hung up on. Usually when that happened the lead just went to what we called an "A List" which the brand new salespeople got to try to call back -- usually after about two weeks. If the lead said anything to the effect of "don't contact me again" then the record was marked accordingly and it no longer appeared on any call lists -- Unless they asked us to delete their information, we had to hold on to the data and maintain it on a "do not call list" so we'd know who not to call. If we deleted it then they were at risk of getting another call if they filled out another form.