Raffles are supposed to be fun, right?

[draggar]

(Copied from my blog since I'm too lazy to type it all out twice)

If you don’t agree with the title stop reading now.

OK, so raffles should be fun. You go to an event and decide to help support the club or whoever is having the raffle and buy some tickets.

They’re fun until you realize you don’t have any chance of winning.

I was at an event this weekend and they had a raffle to help support the hosting club. I bought tickets in the morning (right after the person running the raffle bought over 200 tickets for “friends”. I put my tickets in the items I wanted (it was a raffle with many prizes and you put your ticket with the prize you want).

Later on, about 30 minutes before the drawing I bought more tickets. One item had one ticket in it so I put 3 tickets in there.

The drawing came and I noticed something fishy.

The person doing the drawing would pull out several tickets, look though them and pick one of the ones she drew out to “win” (many people, myself included, wrote our last names on the ticket). The one that had one ticket in it she pulled them all out (not many), went though 2 and announced the “winner” of the second to last ticket she had.

Then it came to the gift card section of the raffle. They had a little girl who was “unaffiliated with the club” (even though her parents and grandparents are club members). Oddly enough, she had different color tickets, ones they sold later in the day and sold very few. This little girl would look inside the cups, move the tickets around and find the tickets that matched the ones she and her family had. Sure enough, they ended up winning over $150 in gift cards with what looked like about $20 worth of tickets (over $1,000 worth of tickets were sold).

Then the person heading the drawing starts up again. Pulling out several tickets, then picking one. I later checked, out of 100+ prizes, 40 were won by tickets that had numbers within 200 lower than my lowest tickets (being the tickets she purchased for her friends right before I bought mine). Hmm, well over 2,000 tickets were sold and 40% of the prices went to a group of tickets purchased by the person running it (less than 10% of the total tickets sold). I won't even include the number of her friends what won with tickets they purchased.

I’ve participated in many raffles before and most have been fair, but this one was so blatantly obvious at the level of corruption that I do not want to deal with this club anymore nor would I ever even think of supporting their “raffles” anymore. I might as well just hand my money over to the club officers.

[Crossbow]

Any chance somebody has it on video? I bet the local news shows would LOVE to see that.....

[draggar]

It didn't look like it.

[Crazeyal]

Wooooowwww..

Sounds like a letter entitled "Why you should NEVER bother me again" posted to their front doors.

[Saydrah]

ARGH. What a lesson to teach a little kid! Yes, honey, cheat so mommy and daddy can get free DVDs....

You could file a complaint with whatever governmental authority regulates games of chance in your state.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

What Saydrah said.

Raffles are supposed to be subject to a bunch of rules and regulations to ensure they're not rigged. Of course, without video it may be tough to prove.

It's really no different that those "mystery auctions" run on ebay which are actually raffles and the big prize either goes to an associate or friend of the person listing it, or never gets awarded. Ebay $ay$ the$e kind$ of auction$ are not allowed, but yet they let them run until time'$ up, even when they are reported. I wonder what ebay'$ rea$on would be for that? Hmmmmmm.....

[Bright_Star]

Sounds like fraud to me.

[draggar]

Well, I'm not supporting this club anymore after this. If I'm asked to help out at another event I'll say no.

[justZu]

I've been on the board of a few organizations over the years and if we held raffles it was generally understood that we were not allowed to buy tickets. It would be highly inappropriate for board members to win their own raffles. Plus I have NEVER heard of rooting through tickets to pick a winner.

These folks sound like out-and-out crooks. Its a shame there is no evidence. Perhaps you should attend their next event with a video camera...

[PepperElf]

simple solution.... you might not be able to have them officially punished but...
that doesn't mean you can't write a letter to the local paper about what you saw.

[hinakiba777]

Wow that is just not cool at all. Raffles should be fair, it's no fun if they aren't.

I've done a lot of charity auctions and raffles (I was a girl scout), and most of the time you didn't win. My mom won a Christmas basket once, though. That was nice.

[Geek King]

Charity or fundraising raffles should be approached from the standpoint that you want to give to the organization.

That said, anytime you see something that hinky going down, make a bit of a rukus. Ask out loud for an explanation of why they're pulling multiple tickets, or why someone is allowed to look in the ticket cups as they pull the winner. If you mention it to other people in the drawing, I can almost promise you more folks will speak up. Most people stay silent because they don't think anyone else feels the same way.

Is the host club part of a school or other organization? I would write a nice, calm letter detailing the things you saw, and the observations you made to the larger organization.

[Becks]

What organization is that, so I don't do business with them? That's so incredibly wrong.

[STEELMAN]

I think this kind of stuff goes on all the time. At a former job we had customer appreciation day every year. They had food and games and raffled off prizes. There were some expensive items big screen tv etc. The owner would pull names until he got a slip with someone who spent a lot with the company for each prize. All the rest of the people might as well not have wasted their time.

[Whyme]

Remember the Cabbage Patch Craze? My mother always went to church fairs/bake sales and there was usually an auction. Being a kid I generally always went with her. At one church auction they were raffling off 5 Cabbage Patch Kids. My mom entered the raffle as did basically everyone else there (remember these dolls were the hot ticket item at the time). Every single Patch Kid went to a church member who had been manning the booths. Even the other prizes went to people who had been working the auction.

My mother refused to go to any of that church's stuff again as she decided the raffle was rigged. I suppose it could have been a coincidence, but I do remember she wasn't the only one talking about it being rigged or it being a scam. It's turned me off raffles ever since. If I want to give to the cause I will, but I don't want to be scammed into it.