Grab A Billion Dollars
from the read-the-fine-print dept
In yet another and ridiculously more extreme publicity move a new dot com (they're still starting up dot coms these days??) is launching a contest where you can win $1 billion. Of course, the odds of winning are close to nil (1 in 2.4 billion), you have to agree to receive daily spam, and the payouts come over a 40 year period with the vast majority of it coming at the end ($620 million in the final year). I realize it's insured and everything, but my question is what happens to the winner's money (assuming someone actually wins) when this dot com inevitably goes out of business?
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Still a huge outlay for a startup
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Still a huge outlay for a startup
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Still a huge outlay for a startup
Umm... okay maybe you'll just get banned.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Billion Dollar Give Away
It appears that the company is putting a Trojan Horse on the computers of people who try to win the money in addition to all you say. It's quite a poorly written written program and distabalizes systems. I think the virus is trying to get new popup advertising from whereever grab.com keeps that sort of thing and for all anyone knows, it's probably sending out every keystroke pressed on a host computer along with information on ever down load.
It also seems that the contest rules cover a million dollars or at least the fine print on the one I read did that.
[ link to this | view in thread ]