The 'Ole Congratulations You Won Trick

If you ever ran into one of those "Congratulations You Won A Prize!" Internet promotions, you'll know generally you avoid these like the plague. But for kicks, I'd thought I would play along just to see how low Internet marketers can go.

So first thing I did was end up at the landing page of a site promoting a $1000 Best Buy gift card. The first screen that came up is this one with a hurry up countdown timer.

So I clicked on the button to go to the next screen that wanted my first name, last name, and mobile phone number:

After leaving some bogus information in the form fields, I clicked the button to get the next offer:

I entered in a nice little email address to comply and hit the button again.

Guess what I got this time?

Nothing like asking people for their personal information and then bailing out!

I wonder how Best Buy would feel knowing that someone is using their good name to get people to offer up their full name, email address, and mobile phone number for a $1000 gift card?.

About Kerry Kobashi

Kerry is the founder of KerryOnWorld. He lives in Silicon Valley and has worked as an engineer and project manager. He owns Kobashi Computing a consulting company.