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Comment by bingdig | Hacker News Reader

Why are you letting people without deposits get in on the drawings? Seems like I could just spam you with mail and get a bunch of entries without depositing savings, at the cost of users who are depositing.

From the website: > Mailing In. You can receive one (1) Ticket by sending a handwritten sheet of paper with your name, address, e-mail, and phone number to: 45 East 22nd St. #26B New York, NY 10010. For each completed sheet of paper, you will receive one (1) Ticket. If you want to select your own numbers you should include those numbers on the sheet of paper. If you do not provide numbers, they will be randomly provided. Limit of one request per envelope. The entry will award a Ticket for the drawing that starts on the next Monday, after the mail in was received (not postmarked). ... Limit of 10,000 Tickets per person per week, regardless of method of obtaining a Ticket.

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For legal reasons, we need to have a mail-in option. It's called an AMOE ("Alternate Method of Entry").

We prohibit automated entries though and each mail-in entry needs to be handwritten sent in its own envelope. The postage costs more than the EV of one entry, so we don't expect this to be an issue.

First off, very cool idea. I'm a fintech PM and had the idea to build something similar. Glad to see someone doing it!

From my research, it sounds like, because prize linked savings accounts are so new in the US, it's unclear whether requiring someone to have an account would count as consideration. By offering an AMOE are you taking a conservative position on this until it's more clear? Or, has a judge/court ruled on this?

I was involved in a sweepstakes at a bank a couple years ago and we took a similar route as you, offering a mail in AMOE, requiring handwritten entries. Without any marketing, we received several thousand entries, mostly from people who mail in entries to every sweepstakes they find.

Yes you're spot on. We are taking the conservative approach for now by operating as a sweepstakes. We haven't had any issues with mail-in entries. I suspect because in our case the EV of a single entry for a single week is less than the postage cost.

Haha I did the math on this for that exact reason. I guess it only makes sense if you live in New York and can walk by the mailing address.

There are prohibitive restrictions on lotteries. This is the same reason when you see "buy now win a chance at _" advertising, there's small print somewhere that explains no purchase is required, and provides a[n inconvenient] alternative to getting chances in the giveaway.

More detail here, a quick scan showed it to be reasonably in line with my outdated knowledge on the topic, at least... https://gleam.io/guides/no-purchase-necessary

Yup. Any sweepstakes or prize giveaway you see that is a game of chance will have a "no purchase necessary" clause

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