Sweepstakes: Win a Car or Get a Call from a Telemarketer?

Have you ever been shopping in a mall and walk pass a brand new car that has a sign “Win a Free Car” on its windshield? Then next to the brand new car there is a booth where you can fill out a contest form and enter to win the car. The whole scheme behind this is that when a person fills out that entry form they aren’t really thinking about what will happen to the information on it. Instead, the applicant of the entry form is too excited thinking about winning the new car instead of anything else. What a lot of people don’t know about car sweepstakes is that most of them are just big advertisement ploys for telemarketers that try to sell people timeshares.

When people fill out entry forms to win a free car or a free trip they are giving there information to telemarketers. The information that most entry forms ask for are a person’s name, phone number, and address. The entry forms are then collected and distributed to telemarketers. Usually 2-3 months after a person has filled out the entry form they get a call from the telemarketer. The telemarketer usually congratulates the person on entering and tells them that they can win the trip or win one out of four prizes if they attend a meeting at a location that the telemarketer picks. There are actually a lot of people that decide to go to the meeting because the telemarketer persuades the person in going. The meeting that the telemarketer convinces a person to go to is actually a ploy for advertisers to sell timeshares. When a person goes to one of these meetings they usually go there and a speaker(s) comes out and starts advertising timeshares in hopes someone at the meeting will be persuaded to buy one.

So instead of one person thinking they are lucky and are the only one that won something, every person that fills out an entry form gets a call from a telemarketer thinking they won something. Then when a person gets persuaded in going to a meeting they have to hear someone speak for 90 minutes trying to sell them timeshares. At the end of the meeting there usually is a drawing for prizes. People do win prizes at these meetings but no one usually wins a brand new car. Most of the prizes that are won are usually small ones.

So next time when you pass by a sweepstakes asking for you’re personal information think about what will really happen instead of winning a car. You may get phone calls from telemarketers persuading you that you actually have a good chance in winning the car if you come to a meeting. Then if you do decide to go to that meeting you will again be persuaded by other sale persons trying to sell you timeshares. After this you may win a prize but for the time you wasted it may not even be worth the trouble.