16 Mar 2025 - AJ
Sweepstakes can be fun to enter, if you’re careful.
I’ve won a major prize in a sweepstakes exactly once - I think it was a laptop; this was a decade or two back - and I went through enough rigaramole for it that I never ever want to go through that again. Now, if it was a cheap consolation prize like a $5 or $10 giftcard that didn’t require any paperwork other than giving them my address, maybe I’d take that.
I can tell you that they didn’t require me to send them any money. I did get a tax form from them that I am pretty sure did not require me giving them a Social Security number - I could be wrong though - because I had to report the income. I did have to pay taxes on the laptop but I was pretty savvy on that end and put the money aside for the increased taxes.
(As for the lottery, I’m not into gambling; I’ve had a few scratchoffs given to me as stocking stuffer type things at work but I’ve never won anything. But I can say that my state’s lottery wouldn’t know who I was from Adam if I didn’t contact them and tell them I’d won.)
This oldie-but-goodie of a scam was brought to my attention because I was actually looking at a different scam that came my way and ran across about 10 listings in a row off from a NoMoreRobo scraper for the same “You’ve won a Mercedes-Benz!” scam. Different source numbers, sometimes different call numbers, slight variants in the message, but the same scam with the same ‘prize’.