I don't want to this to sound like a spam post, so I'll be careful and not mention any vendor names.
If any of you have ever seen those banner ads to "get a free macbook" or "get a free laptop" or something and wondered what it was all about, last April, the spouse and I decided "WTF?!" We'll try it!" and clicked on one of the ads and jumped through all the hoops to try and get a "free mac book (black)". (Alcohol may or may not have been involved in our decision.)
Read on if you're interested in a fairly detailed description of what it entailed and what the result was...
I won't tell the name of the web site, but there are a bunch of them out there that seem to operate in the same way. Upon clicking that I wanted to take advantage of the "free macbook" offer, I had to create an account on the site. I did a little homework beforehand and based upon the guidance that I read elsewhere on the web, I first created an email account on gmail just for this purpose. I also owned a small business that had a phone in use only for a small warehouse's alarm system, so I used that phone number. I have a mailing address that's not my house, so i used that for all the correspondence, too. I was determined not to end up being crushed by spammers (email, phone, or snail mail spam).
Having all that, I proceeded. The way this site was set up is that there were four pages of "offers," with each page having a selection of 10 or so offers. The requirements were that we choose "X number of offers" from each page. All total, we had to complete 12 offers. Now, I've seen some (and I think this site may have been one of them) that also had a way to complete the deal by getting "referrals" wherein I entice others to sign up for stuff. In doing so, i could reduce the number of offers I had to complete. The spouse and i decided that we wanted no part of referrals: this was our foolish undertaking and we didn't want to annoy anyone else with it. So, we decided to pick 12 offers and do them ourselves...
It was rather tedious signing up for all 12 offers. We were determined to do all 12 offers in one evening so that we didn't do a few, promise that we'd finish another night, lose interest in the process, and end up wasting our money on the offers we _did_ sign up for. All in all, it took about 5 hours to sign up for them all. We were careful to take detailed notes along the way for every offer we entered. Examples of some of the offers were Blockbuster online, some mail order frozen entrees, acne medicine, web hosting, psychic readings, and other such stuff.
We obviously tried to be as frugal as we could while still honoring the requirements of the free macbook deal. We kept a spreadsheet on everything we spent, all the fees, the value of what we got (the frozen meals were pretty good and the Blockbuster membership, which we kept for 30 days, allowed us to put our Netflix on hold), and the cost associated with returning product that we didn't want to keep. (One of the things was a coffee club and we stayed in that for a couple of months because some of us here drink coffee). The psychic reading was about as useless as one would expect.
Some of the offers had very strict rules about canceling the product or service and we were very careful to obey those rules carefully. Some companies, like Blockbuster, were just fine to deal with and when we were ready to cancel, it was trivial to do so. Some companies were a bit slimier and made it very difficult to cancel their service. One web hosting company, for example, required that we send a notarized letter via snail mail declaring that we wanted to cancel and they were about the rudest people on the planet.
It's a tedious process. Each vendor has to report to the prize agency that the participants completed the offers. After a few months, only a couple of them had done so. We asked the prize company to give us credit for completing the 12 offers and they required us to provide proof to them that we had done so. We had to send them three months of credit card statement, copies of receipts, and a ton of confirming information to convince them that we had complied with all 12 offers.
All in all, I'd say we spent about 20 hours on the administrative duties associated with the record keeping during the six months from the time we started this crazy venture until we got the check today. (I've heard that sometimes they send the actual product and sometimes they send a check for what they deem is an equivalent value.)
It's obvious that the process is designed to wear people down so that they blow it off and give up. We didn't. We sent them everything we were asked to send. Certified mail. We followed up with emails. We stayed on top of it every step of the way. Fortunately, all of this administrative stuff was something we could to on our spare time while watching tv or relaxing.
Finally, they updated our account page to show that we had completed all 12 offers. Now, we had to print a "certificate" for each of the 12 offers and then mail the certificates to them. (Nobody could explain why I had to print certificates that were generated by the awards company, bundle them up, and mail them right back to the awards company, except to make the process more tedious in the hope that we'd blow it off). After sending the certificates we received an affidavit and a W4 form that we had to fill out affirming that we hadn't received any prizes from this company in the past and the W4 was for reporting the income to the IRS.
After sending everything in, we waited for six weeks and there was no change on our status page, so I emailed them. Within 24 hour our status had been updated to "awarded" and we received an email saying that a check would be mailed within 10 business days.
In complying with all 12 offers, we spent $400 out of pocket for all the various deals, products, return fees, postage, etc.
The value of the product we got (and actually used) was about $140 (savings from suspending Netflix, value of the coffee, frozen dinners, and such.)
Our net out of pocket to fulfill the requirements, less the value of the goods we got, was $260. The fine print on the offer said that they could adjust the amount of the reward to compensate for the changing market value of the prize. Because the macbook in the offer was a 2.1 ghz, hardly a new model, and six months had gone by since we started this process, I was worried that we'd get a pretty small check. Quite frankly I was just hoping for a check for $300 or more to cover our expenses so that all that would have lost was our time.
The check arrived today and to my great surprise, it was for $1499.00!
I ran to the bank and deposited it. And now, we have $1499 to buy my spouse a laptop that she desperately needs, having been limping along with just a 1.25 GHz Mini for quite a while. We're going to wait until after 10/14 and see what we might put the money towards.
It was frustrating, it took a lot longer than i thought, I've learned a lot about these things if I ever do it again, and it was a lot of work, but I'm very happy with the outcome. Obviously, I'm not advocating this for everyone and I'm sure there are some horror stories out there surrounding this sort of "free" offer, but I feel that it turned out okay in this case.
(Btw, the spam on my free email account was enormous. Within a day I was getting nearly 100 spams a day. They gradually tapered off and now it's just a few a week that are getting past gmail's spam filters. We've never gotten any snail mail spam, and I don't know about the phone. It was at an unattended warehouse without an answering machine, so for all i know it rang every day all day or it never rang at all.)
If any of you have ever seen those banner ads to "get a free macbook" or "get a free laptop" or something and wondered what it was all about, last April, the spouse and I decided "WTF?!" We'll try it!" and clicked on one of the ads and jumped through all the hoops to try and get a "free mac book (black)". (Alcohol may or may not have been involved in our decision.)
Read on if you're interested in a fairly detailed description of what it entailed and what the result was...
I won't tell the name of the web site, but there are a bunch of them out there that seem to operate in the same way. Upon clicking that I wanted to take advantage of the "free macbook" offer, I had to create an account on the site. I did a little homework beforehand and based upon the guidance that I read elsewhere on the web, I first created an email account on gmail just for this purpose. I also owned a small business that had a phone in use only for a small warehouse's alarm system, so I used that phone number. I have a mailing address that's not my house, so i used that for all the correspondence, too. I was determined not to end up being crushed by spammers (email, phone, or snail mail spam).
Having all that, I proceeded. The way this site was set up is that there were four pages of "offers," with each page having a selection of 10 or so offers. The requirements were that we choose "X number of offers" from each page. All total, we had to complete 12 offers. Now, I've seen some (and I think this site may have been one of them) that also had a way to complete the deal by getting "referrals" wherein I entice others to sign up for stuff. In doing so, i could reduce the number of offers I had to complete. The spouse and i decided that we wanted no part of referrals: this was our foolish undertaking and we didn't want to annoy anyone else with it. So, we decided to pick 12 offers and do them ourselves...
It was rather tedious signing up for all 12 offers. We were determined to do all 12 offers in one evening so that we didn't do a few, promise that we'd finish another night, lose interest in the process, and end up wasting our money on the offers we _did_ sign up for. All in all, it took about 5 hours to sign up for them all. We were careful to take detailed notes along the way for every offer we entered. Examples of some of the offers were Blockbuster online, some mail order frozen entrees, acne medicine, web hosting, psychic readings, and other such stuff.
We obviously tried to be as frugal as we could while still honoring the requirements of the free macbook deal. We kept a spreadsheet on everything we spent, all the fees, the value of what we got (the frozen meals were pretty good and the Blockbuster membership, which we kept for 30 days, allowed us to put our Netflix on hold), and the cost associated with returning product that we didn't want to keep. (One of the things was a coffee club and we stayed in that for a couple of months because some of us here drink coffee). The psychic reading was about as useless as one would expect.
Some of the offers had very strict rules about canceling the product or service and we were very careful to obey those rules carefully. Some companies, like Blockbuster, were just fine to deal with and when we were ready to cancel, it was trivial to do so. Some companies were a bit slimier and made it very difficult to cancel their service. One web hosting company, for example, required that we send a notarized letter via snail mail declaring that we wanted to cancel and they were about the rudest people on the planet.
It's a tedious process. Each vendor has to report to the prize agency that the participants completed the offers. After a few months, only a couple of them had done so. We asked the prize company to give us credit for completing the 12 offers and they required us to provide proof to them that we had done so. We had to send them three months of credit card statement, copies of receipts, and a ton of confirming information to convince them that we had complied with all 12 offers.
All in all, I'd say we spent about 20 hours on the administrative duties associated with the record keeping during the six months from the time we started this crazy venture until we got the check today. (I've heard that sometimes they send the actual product and sometimes they send a check for what they deem is an equivalent value.)
It's obvious that the process is designed to wear people down so that they blow it off and give up. We didn't. We sent them everything we were asked to send. Certified mail. We followed up with emails. We stayed on top of it every step of the way. Fortunately, all of this administrative stuff was something we could to on our spare time while watching tv or relaxing.
Finally, they updated our account page to show that we had completed all 12 offers. Now, we had to print a "certificate" for each of the 12 offers and then mail the certificates to them. (Nobody could explain why I had to print certificates that were generated by the awards company, bundle them up, and mail them right back to the awards company, except to make the process more tedious in the hope that we'd blow it off). After sending the certificates we received an affidavit and a W4 form that we had to fill out affirming that we hadn't received any prizes from this company in the past and the W4 was for reporting the income to the IRS.
After sending everything in, we waited for six weeks and there was no change on our status page, so I emailed them. Within 24 hour our status had been updated to "awarded" and we received an email saying that a check would be mailed within 10 business days.
In complying with all 12 offers, we spent $400 out of pocket for all the various deals, products, return fees, postage, etc.
The value of the product we got (and actually used) was about $140 (savings from suspending Netflix, value of the coffee, frozen dinners, and such.)
Our net out of pocket to fulfill the requirements, less the value of the goods we got, was $260. The fine print on the offer said that they could adjust the amount of the reward to compensate for the changing market value of the prize. Because the macbook in the offer was a 2.1 ghz, hardly a new model, and six months had gone by since we started this process, I was worried that we'd get a pretty small check. Quite frankly I was just hoping for a check for $300 or more to cover our expenses so that all that would have lost was our time.
The check arrived today and to my great surprise, it was for $1499.00!
I ran to the bank and deposited it. And now, we have $1499 to buy my spouse a laptop that she desperately needs, having been limping along with just a 1.25 GHz Mini for quite a while. We're going to wait until after 10/14 and see what we might put the money towards.
It was frustrating, it took a lot longer than i thought, I've learned a lot about these things if I ever do it again, and it was a lot of work, but I'm very happy with the outcome. Obviously, I'm not advocating this for everyone and I'm sure there are some horror stories out there surrounding this sort of "free" offer, but I feel that it turned out okay in this case.
(Btw, the spam on my free email account was enormous. Within a day I was getting nearly 100 spams a day. They gradually tapered off and now it's just a few a week that are getting past gmail's spam filters. We've never gotten any snail mail spam, and I don't know about the phone. It was at an unattended warehouse without an answering machine, so for all i know it rang every day all day or it never rang at all.)
