I’m a retired senior citizen living in Morrow County, Ohio. On Friday, October 25th, I received the attached game card in the U.S. mail. It seemed legitimate enough, sent out by a local car dealer, Mathews Chevrolet Buick, Bucyrus. I tore back the three “Lucky Triple Diamond” game strips to reveal the game results. The presentation of results was easily recognizable as that of a slot machine, and there across the middle row were three triple bars, an obvious slot machine winner.
I compared the slot display to the hierarchy of winning results; it was clearly a second-place winner. Anyone familiar with slot machine symbols would judge the results as I did. A row of triple bars is a winner and it beats a row of double bars; and likewise, a row of double bars is better that a row of single bars. Too bad it wasn’t a row of Triple Diamonds, that would have been the grand prize.
The instructions on the game card illustrated that there were only four possible winning outcomes, so it was natural to conclude that the second highest outcome would win the second highest prize, five thousand dollars cash. This was reinforced by the vertical ranking of winning outcomes and prizes, and by the use of colored fonts that associated winning results with their prizes.
Now, there is a sentence at the bottom of the gamecard that reads, “ORDER OF WINNING HAND DOES NOT MATCH ORDER OF WINNING PRIZES”. It’s hard to know what this means exactly since the word “hand” implies a card game of some sort and not slot machine results. I can only assert that there are four winning slot results and four prizes, so the second highest slot results must win the second prize.
Winners are instructed to call the dealer. I did so, and they asked me for the confirmation number on the mailer. They took my number and said, “Congratulations, you are a winner.” They would not confirm what I had won, only that I had won and that I needed to make an appointment with Mr. Green and come to the dealership to claim my prize. I made an appointment, but also called a couple of times trying to confirm the $5000.00 win, because I really didn’t want to drive there and find out it was a scam. Everyone I spoke with denied even knowing what the prizes were and said I’d have to come into the dealership.
BUT IT WAS A SCAM! Arriving at the dealership at my appointment time several salespeople were milling around the entrance. I told them I had an appointment with Mr. Green at 1:00 PM. One of the salesmen stepped forward and said he could help me because “Mr. Green” was not a real person, just the name they gave out to contest respondents.
I said here’s the game card I received in the mail and it appears to indicate that I won $5000.00. I said I find that hard to believe, but if I didn’t win $5000.00 could they explain why not. The first guy pointed to the sentence about the “winning hand” in an effort to disassociate the slot results with the prizes. When I said that sentence didn’t make sense, another supervisor-type person stepped in and tried making the same argument. I persisted in saying I didn’t know how the order of a winning hand had anything to do with the ranking of slot machine results. He then pointed to a vertical black bar separating the images of winning results from the list of winning prizes and tried to argue that that bar negated any association of the two. I pointed out that the association of results and prizes was obvious by the ranking and the coloring of the fonts used for each. Blue font was the top result and top prize, yellow font was second, red third and black last. Weakened by that observation, his last argument involved a statement about the odds of winning, as if to say, I shouldn’t expect to win since all the cash prize odds were 1 in 40,000.
Things went nowhere from there. I admitted I thought it was a fraud to start with, but I was compelled to confront them over their deceptive practices. I complained that what they were doing to get people into their dealership was akin to elder abuse, since retired folks like me are the most likely to open their junk mail and respond to such things.
Bottom line, there’s way too much deception and unscrupulousness going around that people just seem to take for granted. That’s not right. Folks need to stand up and call out dishonest behavior.
I was angry at this point and said that I was going to contact the State Attorney General’s office and file a complaint. The supervisor encouraged me to do so and said that the mailer had already been approved by the Attorney General. I won’t expound on that comment.
In parting, they wished me a sarcastic “Have a nice day”. My response was, “I don’t know why anyone would buy are car from a bunch of fraudsters like you.”
At the very least, the marketing program employed by Mathews Chevrolet is deceptive and unscrupulous. And, one might go so far as to call it mail fraud. I do.
I’m so disgusted with the state of affairs it makes me sick. America is better than this, and small-town America should be far better than this.
It’s time to put integrity back into our day-to-day affairs, and if we don’t get off our butt and demand it, the downward slide will continue.
Finally, I’ve just got to say, confronting corruption is a righteously enjoyable activity for us old folks.
P.S.
I did contact the State Attorney General’s Office and they were responsive and helpful. Quite surprising, since this would never have happened in my former state, California.
The Attorney General’s representative contacted the owner of the dealership and made him aware of my complaint and suggested he contact me to address my concerns and see if we could reconcile things without further involvement of the AG’s office.
The owner did contact me, and we had a nice conversation about his marketing strategy (scam) and its deceptiveness. He acknowledged that it was a somewhat shifty scheme, but then said it was a tried and true method of getting people into the dealership, AND I was the only person who had complained. Shocked, I had to accept that maybe I was the oddball. Maybe folks just expect to be deceived and misled by advertising and consider it an acceptable practice. I don’t, and never will.
Finally, three months after this incident, a friend of mine who lives in a neighboring county, who I had told about my experience, said he just received the same mailer from the same dealer with the same deceptive contest results. Well there you go. Corruption has been normalized, and it’s an effective marketing strategy in today’s world. Sad.