I actually gave away a Porsche 911. This was not a mall giveaway but a marketing experiment for my new startup: Flat 6 Club.
Yes, we wanted something in return, in this case, we wanted you to buy a t-shirt or start a subscription (merch+content+events), which gives us essentially all the same info, which would enter you in a sweepstakes to win the car. We also wanted to promote the club, which we did.
We researched it and contracted a sweepstakes company who helped us run the sweepstakes legally.
In the end, we gave away the car to a very nice man and his wife, who we flew in from Minnesota to San Diego for the giveaway event.
Some people did think it was a scam.
But there are several operations that actually do give cars away such a Omaze, Diesel Brothers and many more.
There’s a model there based on the new post-search world we live in that has to do with high engagement increasing Return On Ad Spend and other AdTech voodoo.
No doubt there are lots of scams but there are also real winners out there.
We’ve only given away 1 car. We learned a ton.
I decided to kill the monthly subscription after we gave away the car because we grossly underestimated the amount of up-front ad spend required to achieve a good ROAS and I knew we wouldn’t be giving away another car for a long time.
The biggest surprise to me was hearing from people that were sad that we killed the paid membership/giveaway program.
This was $9.11/mo for membership and occasional swag drops and automatic entry into our next giveaway —whenever that might be. I communicated personally with some of these folks.
The gist of what I learned was that for $9.11/mo, people enjoyed the hope that they may one day win a 911. We literally had people beg us to bring it back. This is probably the same happiness that a lottery ticket brings to many people. It’s not really that they expect to win. As long as someone wins, they’re buying some hope, some excitement… a dream.
In a world where the deck is stacked against most people regardless whether they "do the right things" like go to college hope of a chance windfall may be the only way to reach beyond their economic situation. $9.11 saved per month isn't going to ever buy a car, but it might win one and that's an easy value proposition to some people.
I read your comment as "College can only improve your chances, especially in certain fields. And at the very least it's smarter than hoping for a windfall". Did I understand that right?
If so, I don't necessarily agree. College is an expensive (dollars and time) proposition that rarely pays off. Trade schools, boot camps, etc. are probably better investments for many people. And frankly, saving your money and hoping for a windfall is probably smarter than going to college unless you have a very clear idea already of what you want to study and what career you want to go into afterward.
College is not an automatic positive. For a lot of people, their degree ends up not being worth their student debt.
Or maybe I misunderstood the "it can only improve your chances" part... like maybe you meant "it can improve your chances, but only in certain fields", vs "it can only improve your chances (not worsen them)"?
> Just get a STEM degree and it’s hard to do poorly afterwards.
Wait until the winds of the economic climate change their direction again; until this moment, celebrate and post such texts on HN that will become bad advice.
Ah, the AI-mediated boom of janitors, teachers, and other low-paid jobs that are costly to automate. I wouldn't say that they will bathe in money though. Being low paid is their competitive advantage.
I would disagree. There are several sections of STEM where there really isnt much for you. What are you supposed to achieve with a bachelors in physics?
A physicist can be a good multi-disciplinary, quantitative problem solver. I think the reason is that physics doesn't "own" very many practical techniques, so we are constantly borrowing from other fields. Physicists also tend to keep their math skills after graduation. Most program well enough to be dangerous, and with a bit of guidance can become good developers.
I got a BS in math and physics, then continued for a PhD in physics. Today I work for a company that makes measurement equipment. We have engineers from most of the traditional disciplines, but they tend to be silo'd, and happy to avoid math and theory. Unavoidably, understanding (and proving) how the product works involves a combination of mechanical, electronics, data processing, statistics, and so forth. My long term role is to be the person who understands how the product works, not only acquiring domain knowledge but creating it.
The deal is that physics isn't an exclusive guild, and there are people in other disciplines with similar inclinations, but they're as rare as physicists. So I can't tell you why you need a physicist at the exclusion of any quantitative engineer with 30 years of experience. I can't promise that you'll get rich at it. I just try to help people and learn new things.
It might differ between countries, but I've found that physics is one of the most valued degrees. It's a demonstration of problem-solving skills that are very desirable for a variety of jobs (e.g. software development).
I’d hire a physics BS grad for a software dev job. The ability to reason through mathematical problems is very similar. But then, I’m an atmospheric science student who ended up as a programmer.
Other than perhaps space exploration, what do any of these have to do with physics? It seems what you are arguing for is “just found multiple highly successful businesses”, which… well, yeah. Why do you need a physics degree for that?
I think cars have something to do with physics(like most real things), and since physik is applied math and being good with applied math might also help with numbers of money in general, I think a physics degree is helpful in allmost any job.
Physics seems to attract the sort of people who have the sort of arrogance it takes to look at a product or business and say "This is not great. I can start work from first principles and build a better one". Elon Musk is certainly an example, but not the only one (think MySQL/MariaDB, 90s Nokia, or more far-fetched example, the Red Special guitar). Physics also tends to be just difficult enough that most computing or finance problems are easy in comparison, and some of the math is useful.
It was supposed to be a joke, which maybe people missed, about how Elon Musk was a physics major and how mean values on power law distributions are distorted greatly by the outliers.
So I have n clue what the median is, but I assume, like all income and wealth distributions it follows a power law distribution.
Idk... I know like 10 people who got degrees in math and none ended up working in a job that requires any degree at all. Food service, secretaries, factory workers, insurance salesmen.
I just think there isn't nearly enough jobs in the field compared to the amount of people who are graduating with math degrees. There's only 27,700 actuaries in the US - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/math/actuaries.htm
First, you're sample size of 10 people has no value.
Second mathematics is just one degree and can not be used as a representation of all degrees. Finally actuaries are just on career that someone with a math degree might get so that total number doesn't have value when talking about the potential of a math degree
They are a libertarian thinktank, so take it with a grain of salt, but it's a lot more data than we've had in this thread so far.
TLDR: Engineering pays, computers pay almost as much, art and music are usually a net negative (over 42 working years).
Looking at math, 88% of graduates will earn a 42-year ROI of <=$1,000,000, which means most of them are earning an additional $24k/year on top of what they could've expected to earn without a degree ("counterfactual earnings": https://freopp.org/how-we-calculated-the-return-on-investmen...). Only 3% of math majors should expect a negative ROI (i.e., they would've been better off NOT getting their degree). By comparison, 68% of art & music majors will have a negative ROI on their degree.
That’s the thing that naïve expected value arguments miss - sometimes even though in the long run you’re better off not buying lotto tickets or insurance, we don’t live in the long run and often it’s worth sacrificing a bit of expected value to hedge against a potentially devastating loss, or create the tiny possibility of a life-altering windfall.
True, but it usually doesn't stop with a one-off lucky shot. Some people just repeatedly spend money in ways that will hurt them in the long run. It's a sad situation if you think your best hope for the future is (extremely unlikely) random luck or keeping shady creditors at bay.
There are a whole lot of companies out there fishing for vulnerable people, in all shades from legally shady businesses to pretty much all ad and credit companies.
The reason I asked is because almost every sweepstakes I see on youtube/instagram/tiktok violates this so I am not ever sure all these "sweepstakes companies" know the rules.
fwiw - I follow a number of car YT channels that do giveaways (cleetus mcfarland, etc). They've always mentioned the no purchase required aspect and have a third party company who handle the draw, etc.
> But there are several operations that actually do give cars away such a Omaze, Diesel Brothers and many more.
From the article: "There are other types of car giveaways run by more legitimate parties (charity raffles, event promotions) that do deliver the goods — but if you win, you’re liable to pay a hefty gift tax."
Great question. I’d estimate the odds of winning our car were orders of magnitude better than any organized lottery.
We had a lot to learn about successful execution on the marketing side so the actual number of entries was well less than 100k.
A properly motivated individual may be able to automate finding first-timers like us, and entering via sending postcards, and actually have an excellent chance of winning.
Don't worry, they've mostly moved on to selling crypto and NFTs for the most part... I haven't seen a car parked in my local mall for ages, there's a bitcoin ATM parked in that space now.
There's a certain breed of huckster that even if they designated a prize winner, it would be one of their family members. The most important part of managing scams is to expose them, and cite the names involved so that they need to pick a different line of work.
But you are assuming what they are doing is illegal. Just because the car isn't winnable might be misleading but that doesn't make it a crime if the defendent claims that they never said that you could win the car, they could also claim that the Ts and Cs describe the real scenario.
Even if it is slightly a grey area, you then have a lawyer fight which costs a ton of cash and then even if found guilty, what are you realistically going to do to someone who pretended that you could win a car to market their timeshares? life in prison at $100K/year to the tax payer?
This is why consumer protection institutions exist (SEC, FTC, FDA, etc.) so individuals don't need to sue.
These sorts of sales tactics should just be illegal and criminal. If your sales pipeline requires exploiting human cognitive failures (ie., "boiler room sales tactics") then you're scamming people. A business exists to provide a service people want, not to scam people into something they dont. The gov. provides limited liability protections to businesses, not to scams.
I think we're far enough into our understanding of human psych now to say "here are the fault lines", if your business principally (, systematically, essentially, ...) uses them to make money, it's illegal.
You can never guarantee that! Even if the law was able to be that clear-cut about a particular crime, plenty of people would still believe they will get away with it, otherwise there would be no hard crime in the world right?
In lots of cases, this is demonstrably not true. Sure some scammers might make millions but many make much less. Look at the average cost for prison, the cost of the police and Courts and it can add up to much more.
I'm not saying that you should only jail people if it's cheaper but society cannot afford to incarcerate everybody who commits a crime, not only for the money but the effect it has on ex-cons who can't find work and spiral downwards; families growing up with parents in prison; hardening a soft criminal by jailing them with hard criminals.
Sadly, it is much more complicated than we want to admit and there aren't many good alternatives that I have seen. Tends to be quite polarised "never jail people" or "always jail people".
The government does nothing about the overwhelming majority of small time scammers. It’s left to the civil courts and small claims courts. When the feds do prosecute scams, it’s typically for large dollar value schemes that defraud tens of millions or more.
So we already have that soft on crime reality when it comes to scamming and false advertising. The average person believes the government is far, far more active than it really is in this type of issue. Crime pays and most criminals get away with it.
> The most important part of managing scams is to expose them,
Yes, because their targets will be reading Hacker News.
The Nigerian Prince scam still works, and every person in the world has heard of it by now.
> and cite the names involved so that they need to pick a different line of work.
I don't think they value their public image half as much as you seem to think. But you're on to something.
What if the alternative line of work they had to pick was cleaning toilets at a federal penitentiary, or stamping license plates, or maybe breaking gravel at a re-socialization camp somewhere in Siberia?
Even in that case it can be argued that the actual quote was written by a real doctor and the actor is simply reading it. This one sounds like a complete scam.
It's pretty easy to be deceptive without needing to be false. A lot of advertising these days just use a mix of clever selective language, vague subjective terms, and omission of important information to avoid directly lying. It's pretty much normalized across all marketing at this point.
To my knowledge an ad doesn't have to correspond to the visual which is why a lot of ads visually sell or imply sex in some way, meanwhile whatever there selling isn't. Clothing is notorious for this. Sticking a car there just catches your eye like an attractive person might to lure you in. It's then up to the passerby to read the details and fine print of what's actually being sold.
> There are other types of car giveaways run by more legitimate parties (charity raffles, event promotions) that do deliver the goods — but if you win, you’re liable to pay a hefty gift tax.
I don't think it's a gift tax, but ordinary income tax. A coworker won a living room sofa set on a game show, and the staff were waiting with a 1099 for her as soon as she stepped off the stage. The IRS says you need to pay tax based on the fair market value, but the shows will list the prize at it's full retail price.
So if you should happen to (and you won't) win the Acura, you'll owe 25% or more on it. Plus any state income tax. I'm not sure when the IRS actually wants their money, but a safe assumption would be "soon". Perhaps by the next quarterly estimated-tax date.
Oprah's famous "You get a car! And you get a car! And everyone gets a car! " show landed each audience member who got a 'free' car with a $6000 tax bill.
Offering to pay the tax does trigger more tax; but as the added tax is less than what you add to the price, the total amount converges (as long as the tax rate is less than 100%). To have the recipient end up with a net payment N after taxes you've to pay N/(1-r), with r being the tax rate.
With a 25% tax rate and car value of $28,500; to make it a tax-free gift Oprah should've paid an additional $9,500.
Yeah, the term is "grossing up" and it's often done for bonuses and things. I've also seen it on sweepstakes. One for Fage yogurt offered a dream vacation to Greece and included a gross-up to pay the income tax.
The problem was that the people in the audience all needed cars and couldn't afford them. They didn't have money. Finding $6000 to keep a gift when you're broke is a hard problem.
IRS does offer payment plans at least for some types of tax debt. But really, if you need a car but are unable to get $6000 to obtain one, I'm not sure if you have that much better luck in the used car market, since a car would still require some thousands that you either need to have at hand, or get a loan to. If you can't get a loan for a $6000 new car, can you get a loan for a $3000 used car?
> I don't think it's a gift tax, but ordinary income tax.
Correct. Prize winnings are taxed at your ordinary income tax rate. The gift tax applies to gifts, not prize winnings, and even then, the giver pays it, if applicable.
In Australia, the thing called an "art union" used to be how to raise money for charity, and the prize was often a home, and they really exist, and people did win and live in them, and some of them were classics of the low spot of the 60s and 70s, shag-pile carpet, sunken entertainment pit, volcano-stone fireplace...
They still take place. I suspect the buildings have moved with the (architectural) times.
They certainly aren't as common as they used to be, but I still see them. I think maybe Royal Life Saving Society still do it? Gold Coast apartments are typical properties now. I'll never enter though - not since they sold my details and I got spam calls for years.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5473090/ (swingin' safari: 2018) is a coming-of-age film set in Australia, which includes an exploding whale, Guy Pearce, Kylie Minogue, and a beautiful shag-pile den with sunken pit. It was shot on the GC.
Yes, the normal progressive tax brackets apply. So if Oprah gives you a car worth $40k, and you have no other income that year, you will take the standard deduction and pay 12% on what's left. Don't forget to pay your state income tax and also the DMV to title & register the car. Getting free stuff isn't cheap!
A friend of the family recently won a million dollar house in the hospital raffle. It was a house on the Gold Coast in Queensland, which he immediately sold. I think he might also have won $20,000 of gold bullion in another hospital raffle.
And off topic but my brother won a years supply of Kentucky Friend Chicken in the footy tipping..... and he is a vegetarian. Imagine that - you win the sacrifice of 365 chickens for your skill in picking footy teams. KFC gave him 50 x $50 vouchers.
And I once spent two full days entering every possible online competition I could find. You can guess how much I won.
Here is Australia in the 1980's it was common to find free competition tickets that you could enter in fish and chip shops. For a joke, a friend entered another friend, who won an all expenses paid trip for two to Europe, without knowing they had been entered.
I personally during the source of my many years, have won precisely nothing ever.
The Gold Coast and Queensland are in Australia, so you're 100% on the money. You see Surf Life Saving raffles for gorgeous homes and cars all the time. I imagine the laws in our country (I'm also in Australia, though not Australian) mean the advertised prizes have to be winnable.
there are also raffles for entire houses held in the vancouver bc area, for a children's hospital and a few other charities. the houses/property really do exist and there really is a winner each year. it's my understanding that these do see a fair bit of legal scrutiny and oversight to make sure everything is above board, tickets are like $100 or $300 a piece.
We get the car parked in the shopping centre with big "WIN THIS CAR" signs. Entry is $5-10 per ticket though, so it seems feasible there's actually a winner somewhere along the way (My assumption is a Mustang appears in a few shopping centres at once and one is ultimately given away, for example).
> Patrick collects a rolodex of her (fake) data — full name, age, marital status — then tells her she has to be at least 28 to enter the drawing. “Tell your parent to call me,” he says, and hangs up.
> Her “dad” (our writer, Conor) gives it one last try. Patrick tells Conor that in order to win the car, he has to go to a local Great Destinations office and attend a 90-minute timeshare presentation.
This is the only part I still don't understand after reading the article. Why do they limit this to people at least 28? Is this just a way of filtering out people unlikely to have enough money to scam into spending on a timeshare, or are they avoiding some esoteric regulation that somehow blocks them from marketing to younger people?
Yes, and that's why I asked if the intention of limiting the scam to people 28 and above was about filtering people unlikely to be able to pay for them
Anecdotally, I had 20000x more money at 22 than 28. If I remain employed for the rest of the year I might be on par by the end of it. Graphing my income over the last 10 years would look like a memory leak
I'm hoping the same. Regarding 401k please remember that employer matches do not count towards the contribution limit, always calculate your deduction so that you max it out without the employer match. The employer match is the cherry on top.
My income potential increased quite dramatically actually. But after multiple burnouts, and struggling with symptoms of ADHD, it doesn't really matter what you accomplish most of the time if you miss enough morning standups to piss off the manager. So I've really struggled to maintain _any_ employment, and therefore I had literally zero money going into this year. The memory leak analogy was due to working every so often enough to bank a few tens of thousands, and then losing that job and just gradually draining mt entire bank account while looking for a new one.
Even if this outfit is fully owned and operated by a scuzzy timeshare company, do they really make enough money to justify the $1500/~=22 marks?
The article only mentions people being contacted by the timeshare company, but I wonder if they might sell the info as a secondary revenue stream, especially given the waiver which claims to override federal do-not-call lists.
How much would one packet of contact info+metadata sell for, if the subject has signed on to be contacted by advertisers?
> How much would one packet of contact info+metadata sell for, if the subject has signed on to be contacted by advertisers?
LendingTree.com was charging $70 per "lead", this was 2018 or so, not sure how prices have changed since then. However this was on the high end, zillow.com, also sold leads but for quite a bit lower (although you got what you paid for).
> do they really make enough money to justify the $1500/~=22 marks
I was wondering the same, but one thing that helps the math in their favor a bit was that the 22 was in one hour on a weekday afternoon. I imagine it’s higher on weekends and evenings.
Yes. Timeshare sales orgs make a boat-ton of money. The average punter isn’t capable of doing the math to compute that a timeshare is among the worst deals anywhere.
Welcome to the ecosystem of lead-generation, and the specialized marketing campaigns which drive business sales. One of my earliest technical jobs was writing the middle-ware systems that handled lead data, and tracked the sales conversion rates of the companies we served. As an aside, it is the worst job I ever had in any of my careers…
In general, you are never dealing with a single company:
1. An advertiser operating on Radio/TV/Web/Email to drive specific consumers to a company sales lead funnel
2. A marketer running a consumer data collection form (Web/1-800-Call-center/SMS/IVR) to sort which campaign is best suited for the potential consumers
3. A marketing data-broker cross-referencing and scrubbing user data to filter bogus/old/duplicate customer leads, and ascertain the time critical nature of which campaigns to deploy new leads into
4. A company sales campaign manager monitoring lead conversion rates between the data-broker and the company sales platform (often another web-form/call-center/IVR/spammer/SMS). In general, most professional firms will drop campaigns under a 17% success rate, but spammers are happy even under 0.056% terrible rates (where old lead data goes after everyone else gave it a hard pass).
5. A sales conversion success rate lead price adjustment by push back from the company campaign to the data-broker (higher % sales per lead pool mean higher prices). The data-broker also cross checks the conversion rate for a given lead pool, and will adjust the quality/price per lead by comparing many company campaigns to keep everyone honest.
While many firms will honor a Do Not Call record flag by law, once a lead is in the ecosystem it can be resold to dozens of firms all over the world. It was also common for call-centers to leech call lists to resell to other data brokers, which would predictably have terrible conversion rates equivalent to spam email.
I should probably mention the data-broker was also a social networking site owner, and this was the primary fiscal motivation behind running the platform. ;-)
I do the same thing with every cold-call power-sales phone call I get. I try to keep them on the line as long as possible, while paying as little attention as possible.
Put the phone on speaker, turn down the volume a little, and carry on working on my computer.
I feel that the only way to end spam (email and phone), is to take up as much time of the spammer as possible.
If all 25m recipients of an email scam replied with the intention to drag it out as long as possible, the scammer will never identify those who actually fell for it.
If all 25m recipients of a phishing email responded with poisoned data, the target bank would quickly realise what was happening.
If everyone who ever receives a spam phone call kept the person on for 30m instead of dismissing the call in 5s, it would be unprofitable to make these calls.
In general, dropping the ROI on these techniques to negative would stop them.
Unfortunately, automated IVR systems have become difficult to quickly spot thanks to Google Machine Learning based NLP, and your telecom company still pays the robocall campaign even if you never answer due to how the legacy phone systems were designed. Additionally, while the VoIP based phone centers boxes allowed inexpensive/free long distance, they also provided the unscrupulous unlimited outbound traffic to cold-call users. Even if your telecom only pays fractions of a penny to receive the call, a third-world teenagers computer time is likely worth far less than you'd guess. ;-)
While the number-filters on modern smart-phones are fairly good (origin spoofing is illegal), these devices still suffer from other problems like app lamer-ware stripping contact lists (is your "cloud backup" on by default?).
There's an old project that does exactly that! Lenny has some long vids up on youtube. I suppose the next step is using some of the newer AI stuff to improve the interaction...
> once a lead is in the ecosystem it can be resold to dozens of firms all over the world
Hence the GDPR's 'legal basis for processing' requirement. If you did not obtain consent for that specific use then you don't have a legal basis for processing.
Relevant if and only if all entities involved fall within a given legal jurisdiction, and many dubious firms "partners" do not for this very reason. One often can't completely solve a fiscally driven technical problem with legislation.
Accordingly, what percentage of people actually read those 5 page end-user-agreements before enabling cloud backup on their phone (about 1/3000 on average). ;-)
I am quite sure it is not valid in Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Brazil, China and Russia?
Again, one is incorrectly assuming scammers care about your local laws in the first place, and present informal fallacy as an argument with little contextual relevance.
Given our uniquely crafted developer contact data was often injected into the data sets as a logic test, it was common practice to climb back up the delivery pipeline to identify the cheats and cons. ;-)
Yes, the number of Pakistanian, Indian, Nigerian and so on websites EU people visit is off the scale. Oh, wait, it isn't. And even then: technically they do fall under the GDPR.
Wasn't the GDPR deployed in late 2018?
By then I was well into a whole different career path. Again, an irrelevant informal fallacy orthogonal to the conversation (Autism spectrum perhaps?)
Besides, most of Netherlands IP blocks are already blacklisted on my routes for various theft-of-service scams including SIP hijacking attempts. i.e. your country rates in the top 5 nuisance traffic origins... congratulations.. I guess... ;-)
Well that's just disappointing. There is no car and it's all just smoke and mirrors to subject you to things like a timeshare promo and harvest your data? That's not even a good scam! It's just like countless others. The only creativity is the car and its not even theirs its just a loaner from some random dealership.
I recall as a younger child (teens, in the early to mid 2000s) there were these websites that allowed you to get all kinds of free stuff as long as you gave them your details. I, as someone who had only just discovered the internet (i.e. clueless) after emigrating to the Netherlands only a few years earlier and being in a relatively poor household, decided it was the most awesomest thing. I was signing up for all of these websites.
"Who cares!" I thought to myself. "What can they even do?! As long as I don't pay them anything it's fine!" I naively told my parents, who were just as naive around these issues. I got told off a few times, not because I was giving out my data to every company under the sun, but because random things were coming through the door.
I remember once a prominent pet food company sent out a sample cat food package. I didn't even like cats. Pets were frowned upon in our culture.
Needless to say, I'm some 15 years older now, and I regret every single form I was filling out back then. I realise that everything has vastly changed and systems change, but I can't help but feel somewhere some system still has my data, and it's only a matter of time before something wrong happens with it, if it hasn't already.
This kind of thing probably targets similar households. Poor people who are generally uneducated on these matters. It's sad that such thing isn't outlawed.
Realistically.. they have your name, date of birth, and where you lived as a kid. What's the worse that could happen? I don't think there's enough there to open a credit card under your name.
Because the fundamental economics of time shares are a scam. They are pitched as "ownership" but what they really are are perpetual rental contracts with no way out. (The rent is called "maintenance fees" but it doesn't matter what label you attach to it. It's a sum of money that you are obligated to pay year after year after year. If it quacks like rent...) And you even have to pay a hefty sum up front for the privilege of being obligated to rent a place once a year forever.
Most of what you've described can also be applied to condominiums. The only difference is that you can occupy them year round, but I don't think that's a relevant difference. Are the "fundamental economics" of those also "a scam"?
Condo fees are generally set by an elected council of owners based on actual spending needs. The condo association is also 'owned' by the condo owners, so if it dissolves any assets in the accounts revert to the owners. This means that you are entering into a partnership where the other partners are theoretically acting in your interest. They also come with the legal protections of being real property.
Timeshare owners are generally not represented by a committee of other owners, the money does not go to things approved by them, and the company makes no promises about acting in the interest of timeshare owners.
So yeah, you are contractually obligated to pay fees for a space you can occupy is where they are similar. There's a reason that timeshares almost never appreciate, often being given away for free, where a condo tends to hold value or appreciate.
In Australia you're obliged to provide the accounts to prospective buyers and current owners in "condo" (we call them Strata Title) units. Very easy to see where the money is going and how it's been managed.
As a fun little bit of anecdata, newer buildings are always the worst with many leftover, teething issues and strata title can sometimes be heavily in debt. Old buildings can have huge amounts in the sinking fund and may elect to reduce yearly fees and rely on interest.
> The only difference is that you can occupy them year round, but I don't think that's a relevant difference.
Most people think it's a pretty relevant difference. For one thing, if you occupy a place year-round, you can keep your belongings in it. That's a pretty significant feature for most people, which is the reason most people choose to live in a permanent domicile rather than moving every week. But different strokes for different folks I guess.
I suspect there's also an overselling of a given property, and if not straight overselling, overselling the viable months.
Most vacation destinations are somewhat seasonal. Maybe the most major cities with year round cultural activities, but not in places like beach and ski towns.
You can potentially have 52 "1-week-a-year" people fighting over the 16-20 weeks a year the location is most desirable, and maybe settling for lesser times, or just not using it that year. Hell, why not sell 60 memberships, knowing some will just punt in any given year?
The "a relevant difference" part was in relation to the sentence after, which is whether something is a scam or not. Regardless of what utility year-round occupancy affords you, I doubt that's the defining factor between whether it's a scam or not.
I have no idea what a timeshare is (sorry) but aren’t condos something you fully own? Like some of my friends live in condos, some lived in a condo for a few years and then sold them before moving into a house or some other city. Where I live the condos are usually similar in appearance to apartments (bed bath living room kitchen all on same floor) and there are townhomes which are a bit fancier and you might get an attached garage.
I think they're talking about the fact that you're required to pay condo fees to maintain your ownership of the condo, which does kind of make it a hybrid rental in a way. Obviously there's pretty good reasons for condo fees on some level (ignoring any mismanagement that may or may not be uncommon -- though sometimes the mismanagement is that they're too low), but it's something you have to factor in. You can never be completely free and clear with a condo that has fees.
I don't think there's a way of owning a domicile in any capitalist country without paying a membership fee (property tax) to the government. If you rent, you're doing that indirectly.
I mean, "homeowner association fees" are just condo fees for places that aren't apartments. They seem even less likely to go towards anything useful than condo fees do though.
But yes, that's true about property taxes. But since that's a commonality between condos and otherwise-individually-owned property it doesn't really matter. In a condo you pay both, but if you own outright you only pay one. In a rental you're kinda paying both combined, because the owner pays property taxes and then presumably also tries to extract profit.
Anyways, I don't agree that condos are a scam in the same way that timeshares are, and I don't think a condo is just a glorified rental (though the one condo I have owned in my life had absurdly high fees that I regretted getting myself into) or a scam like timeshares are. I was just trying to explain what I though the GP meant.
Condo home owners association control the fees. They go to insurance, money to replace common owned properly like the roof, exterior walls, paint, parking, landscape etc. You can go get elected and convince the board to not invest in these things and lower the fees. You can also vote to increase it to pay for things like to add solar.
Did you ever look HOA financial docs that details exactly what the HOA spent money on?
In the condo I owned? Yes, I became quite familiar with how the money was spent, and most of it was in principle logical for the building it was in, and the board wasn't doing anything unethical or anything like that.
It was, unfortunately, just a very bad situation for the building, which was aging poorly from its origins as a low unit count high value building with a lot of expensive amenities, windows that couldn't handle changing climate, a parkade that needed deep structural work, having been built when asbestos was in vogue, and a population that was once wealthy but was now largely on fixed incomes and declining property value.
No one did anything wrong (except maybe a few attempts to fix the parkade in overly optimistic and superficial ways that required re-fixing at more expense later), it just wasn't worth condo fees ballooning well past my mortgage payments and it ended up costing well hundreds of $k to sell and doing so was one of the most stressful times of my life.
None of that means "condos are always bad". Just this one was a mistake.
If you mean what I said about HOA vs condo fees, I've only ever seen HOA used for detached homes or townhouses, where the common concerns are a lot less critical than in an apartment building (and so, from what I know, tend to be more frivolous). But maybe it's used differently elsewhere.
Every condo I’ve owned the condo fees were controlled by the HOA. Sometimes we were members of two HOAs, one for the neighborhood and one for the condo complex.
Where I live if it's a condo the organization built around the unit owners is called a condo association or corporation. The principle is the same though. The board is elected by the unit owners based on ownership units and they manage or delegate management of things like fees and reserves and upkeep.
The main difference between a condo association and an HOA here is what kind of property is involved. But HOAs are also a relatively recent development here and aren't regulated as strongly so they vary more.
> A timeshare (sometimes called vacation ownership) is a property with a divided form of ownership or use rights. These properties are typically resort condominium units, in which multiple parties hold rights to use the property, and each owner of the same accommodation is allotted their period of time. Units may be sold as a partial ownership, lease, or "right to use", in which case the latter holds no claim to ownership of the property. The ownership of timeshare programs is varied, and has been changing over the decades.
Timeshares are very similar but the difference is that you typically only get a week or two to stay there - it's jointly owned by others.
That obviously has a big impact on resell value - so much to the point that some timeshare owners can't give it away let alone sell it, because no one wants to be beholden to the maintenance fees.
No because you buy a condo and get full ownership. You can use it 24/7, rent it out, remodel internally … hell you can even break down walls if they aren’t structural or add new walls if you want.
Depending on specifics you even get partial ownership of the whole building and a seat on its management board. At least that’s how it works for my mom, they run the building like a co-op and there is no other owner than the people who own the apartments inside.
edit: a timeshare in comparison is kinda like buying an NFT of an apartment. It gives you the right (obligation) to use the place for a period of time every year
A condominium is an ownership structure, where each owner owns the exclusive rights to some portion of a building (or set of buildings) and share common ownership in the rest of the condo association. I fail to see how that's even passingly like a timeshare, except that both typically have fees and involve real estate.
1. If you own a condo, you get voting shares in your strata/HOA. The owner collective collectively sets fees, maintenance schedules, etc. The owners act for the interest of themselves, so as an owner, that is usually in your interest. Legislature protects your rights as an owner.
2. If in some hypothetical world, you were unhappy with the fees, and you couldn't sell your condo, you can walk away from it anytime you want, and all you're out is the purchase cost of the condo.
3. You can't do that with the timeshare. You need to find another sucker to take the timeshare off your hands.
4. For what you get out of it, the cost of owning/renting a timeshare versus owning/renting a condo is horribly tilted against the timeshare.
5. Which is why intelligent people will pay a million dollars for a condo, but only idiots buy timeshares.
6. Which why you get screwed if you want to do #2, because of #3.
The reason people buy timeshares is because they are bad at math, bad at finances, and don't understand that they are getting fleeced.
Timeshares don't necessarily have to be shitty scams, it's entirely possible to design one that isn't a waste of money. But in practice, all of them are.
I’m on the board of my condo’s HOA and can see where every dollar of my fees get spent. It’s pretty much entirely going into maintenance of the building.
Serious question: how has post-pandemic inflation impacted the economics of timeshares purchased pre-pandemic? Is there any particular point in time where we can look back with the benefit of hindsight and say that a timeshare actually would have been a good investment?
I'm sure that certain timeshares (no inflation adjustment with good governance) have aged really well, and some people that wanted access to specific locations were able to pickup timeshare rights for a song.
The problem is that the "benefit of hindsight" question requires you to compare other investments that have probably fared as well or better without the constraints/risks of typical timeshares.
Honestly I find it kind of a shame because there are places in the world I would actually love to own/rent a regular consistent shareable space in, but it's basically impossible to do, without it being a scam, unless you have a bunch of well-off friends who want roughly the same thing as you.
Probably the closest you can come is buying or renting a place and then airbnb-renting it out most of the time, but then you're getting yourself into some legally grey areas most likely (plus becoming a landlord, which may be quite a lot of work and/or morally questionable in itself depending on your views).
There are other equally shady fronts for this activity. I made the mistake of giving my name and number a person running one of those "raffles" at an NHL arena. I was deluged with time share spam calls for weeks afterwards. I should've known better as the team owner made his money marketing for AOL.
really hate these vulture like slime tactics to go after desperate and gullible people. it just brings tears to my eyes thinking of how shameless people are and how little they think about the after math of their actions. ex) crypto
It seems like this could be weaponized if you filled out a lot of these with the names, emails, phone numbers and other details of people you particularly dislike.
They'll never get out of those shady grey market crm systems..
This idea has existed for decades with magazine and tape/CD subscriptions. Bonus points were given if you picked hard core pornography or new age as the subscription of choice.
on the other hand, if you created a few hundred plausible but fake people and filled out many of these, you could collect an excellent data set of "shady grey market lead generation services that sell peoples' data in aggregate", for the purpose of examining what sort of emails and phone calls they make to the contacts, and then training an anti-spam / call-blocking data set on it.
Gave me smile because I have a little anecdote that happened recently.
My friend showed up for a B-day party, and after some time invited me and few other friends to have a look at his new car. I was thinking he must have gotten a raise at work, because the car was brand new Volvo V40, which is above average expensive in my country and also our income bracket.
Then it turned out he bought a new collar for his dog, and that the producer of the collar organized a prize lottery, where you could win a really nice backpack, and a car. And that my friend won the main prize, which was the brand new Volvo.
Now I know someone who won something really valuable, and also that these prize lotteries can sometime work.
It sounds like they're raking in a lot from this, so you'd kinda think they'd be best off actually giving away a car like, once every 5 years. To literally never give out the thing they're advertising seems like playing with fire. (The actual supposed big prize—after you jump through a lot of other hoops—is $100k, but same deal.)
In Slovakia, there was a sweepstakes of sorts (required some skills) where the main prize was a car. Which in fact turned out to be a loan of the said car for three months.
On the other hand, my first laptop ever was a sweepstakes win in 2007. It wasn't a very good laptop, but it was an honest win.
I used to enter a lot of competitions in my Uni days. Won a few DVDs/CDs, a years worth of coffee, public WiFi for a year, a Sony laptop, an iPad mini and a trip to Florida with car hire and a meet an astronaut meal at Kennedy space center!
I stopped entering comps though because it started to change from "give us your email for some marketing you can opt out of" to "enter with Facebook account where we can see everything about you and you have to share our post on your feed etc".
Pretty sure the UK / EU is better on making sure prizes are what they say they are, but the small print on competitions has got so much worse.
When my wife and I first got married, we went to a timeshare promo (they promised a gas card and lunch for our time). I sat in the back of the presentation room with a complex analysis textbook working through some problems. The presenter saw me there, looked at what I was doing and sent us out of the room before I could damage his prospects. We did manage to talk a couple people out of buying during the free lunch (which was, as I recall, some kind of lame hamburgers and hotdogs).
People should sue the car dealer and the mall. Even if they don’t have a leg to stand on, a few nuisance lawsuits would cause the mall not to want this business
What would you sue for? The time spent listening to the pitch? Your dashed hopes of owning a new car? What are the damages?
This is why there's usually either a criminal fine for false advertising or a class action lawsuit. It's probably better to find someone at the California AG who's interested in shutting down false advertising.
You would sue because there's a sign that says "win this car" and nobody will win that car. As I said, it will get thrown out, but if a few people would do that, it wouldn't be worth the mall's time to deal with them.
“I understand my permission herein overrides my listing on any state of(sic) federal do not call list and any prior listing on the do not call lists of the companies listed above.”
That’s disturbing. There is no way that’s possibly legally binding? Surely there can’t be a loophole this ridiculous in the Do Not Call law?
I’m pretty sure filling out a form with your phone number and a granted permission with that wording does override dnc lists, but you can reverse it again when they call.
The general rule of thumb is that consent to be called overrides the Do-Not-Call stuff. Although, that said, you also have to be able to later withdraw that consent, I believe (I know this is true as far as anti-spam laws go, but I'm not specifically familiar with the telephony rules).
If it's legal, it seems like every business would do this. Your bank, the local McDonalds when you install their app, Uber & Lyft, every e-commerce site would bury in the terms & conditions, etc.
It is legal, and that is exactly what businesses do. The statement was just a notification. Any company you do business with and provide your info can contact you, because you overrode the DNC by giving out your contact information.
I have, but I assume they were just wardialing. I don't think I've ever gotten a scam call where they actually knew my name or DOB or anything else that could be associated with the info I put into the McDonald's app (presumably that's what they would be selling... just the existence of a phone # isn't particularly interesting I'd guess)
People complain that Safari is a terrible web citizen. Here I go to this website, with Safari and my trusty ad blocker extension, and the page keeps reloading endlessly. Who’s to blame? The crappy website, Safari, or its extension?
I mean—-tongue in cheek—-are you trying to illustrate that Safari actually goes above and beyond here by looping infinitely on a page that is about a scam that is essentially about an ad technique that loops you endlessly?
1. Vehicle marketing and 2. personal information and demographics collection for resale preying on the magical thinking of people who play the lottery as wishful
thinking in order to better their circumstances.
"Coinbase reportedly spent $14 million on a commercial with a flashing QR code that encouraged viewers to sign up for an account; new users will receive $15 in BTC until February 15. The strategy was so successful, in fact, that it caused the app to briefly crash during the Super Bowl broadcast."
Me too! My friend's daughter had just turned 18, just got her driver's license, and was at the mall with a younger buddy. She entered and then cajoled her friend, who was ready to go, to wait for the drawing. She won a four-year lease on an Audi A4 and she loved every minute of driving it until the end of the term.
these people are scum. no that isn't too harsh. maybe it's not a detailed enough description? Is the world a better place without these sorts of people? probably.
I'm suprised they go to so much effort to get peoples info in 2022. Surely u can scrape as much of that as you want from social media or just buy it en-mass? Then u can spam people to your hearts content.
They are looking for qualified leads, 28 years or older, hopefully in a couple, mobile number, where you like to go on vacation, and what type of credit card(s) you own. Scraping social media will absolutely not generate leads that a salesperson can contact.
I think the source of the information might be useful. If they truly think they are going to win a car, then the chances of a successful scam are higher. The more gullible. The more vulnerable. Thus an easier target.
If you ever watch scam baiting videos, those Indian scammers share and sell the numbers the collect. If they can fall for the "Microsoft tech support" scam once, then they are likely to fall for the "Amazon refund" scam as well.
How does this work, given there is no sale? Sales tax applies to the sale price paid, but there is no payment. I think the same is true for use tax, too.
I don't think this is universal among all states. After a quick search, I found sales tax does not apply to gifted vehicles in a number of states: Kentucky, Tennessee, New York, Minnesota (between immediate family members). In Texas, it's a $10 gift tax in lieu of sales tax.
Kinda funny how that comment is flag-killed, but an equally unverifiable anecdote is the top comment on the previous discussion, and it claims the same thing:
a lot of things are, I don't think it matters if it's verifiable true, it's a single n=1 anecdote anyway. The meaning comes from the reason it was mentioned, which I don't think is fluff.
That a difficult task might be possible using an unconventional method that the competition designers didn't anticipate. Again, I said believing it isn't necessary.
"
“[When I declined], they proceeded to tell our 12 year old daughter, ‘I guess your parents won’t take you on your dream vacation!’” she says. Then, they handed over her “prize:” a $25 restaurant voucher that required a $100 minimum spend to redeem.
"
Muricans are insane... Do this to me in françe I WRECK you in middle the mall in public taking some free palms in face :)
