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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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I've worked on system with reservations and to be honest younger people don't come through, love cancelling and are a waste of time.

In totally legitimate businesses we've set ages around there just to avoid the hassle and bs.

It works beyond any reasonable expectation

Wouldn't people over 28 be more likely to have money for a timeshare?

In this economy!?

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

Ha, what did you do right or wrong to end up with declining income?

Really hope that they meant disposable income and they're just maxing out 401k contributions and have kids and the like!

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.

Nope, but I elaborated in a sibling comment

Nah, just a really slow turnaround for finding new jobs after losing about 7 of them, and other things that I mentioned in a sibling comment.

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.

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

I read your post again, that makes sense!

It has to do with the income of their target demographics. At 28 years of age the median income is $40,000 in the US.

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