The Entry Is the Exposure

Written By Matthew Delaney

Congress passed the Deceptive Mail Prevention and Enforcement Act on 12 December 1999. It requires a sweepstakes mailing to disclose - in the mailing, in the rules, and on the entry form - that no purchase is necessary to enter, and that buying something will not improve anyone's chances of winning.

Prize fraud is not emerging. It is old enough to have a federal statute written against it.

The Federal Trade Commission's report of 1 December 2025 found that in calendar year 2024, adults 60 and over were, in the Commission's own words, "nearly three times (172%) more likely" than younger people to report losing money on a prize, sweepstakes or lottery scam.

Less examined is the search traffic. Type "senior citizen sweepstakes" or "retirement sweepstakes" into a search engine and what comes back is not warnings. It is entry - prize hubs, freebie sites for older adults, aggregators, AARP's own sweepstakes and contests page.

That matters because of a study published in Innovation in Aging in 2025. DeLiema, Gao, Brannock and Langton surveyed 823 adults aged 60 to 98, every one of them identified by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service as having already answered a mail scam.

Two of the behaviours they measured were entering sweepstakes drawings and buying lottery or scratch-off tickets. Both tracked with how often a respondent was defrauded - the routine-activities scale containing sweepstakes entry at an incidence rate ratio of 1.44, lottery purchase at 1.50.

The authors do not explain it as carelessness. Lotteries, they write, "offer fantasies about a better life and improved social position, which is similar to the premise of many forms of fraud." The person entering and the person taking the prize call want the same thing.

The limit belongs in the same breath. Everyone in that sample had already responded to a mail scam, so the finding describes how often a known victim is defrauded again, not who becomes one. It is an association.

The statute offers something smaller and more usable. Every covered sweepstakes mailing must carry the address or toll-free number of a removal system, and the promoter has sixty days to strike the name from its lists. That mechanism has existed since 1999 and is almost never used.

It also supplies the one test that needs no judgement. A sweepstakes is defined in law as a game of chance requiring no consideration to enter. A demand for a fee is not a suspicious feature of the offer; it is the offer contradicting its own definition.

If this is your family

If your parent enters sweepstakes, ask about it the way you would ask about a magazine subscription. Millions of people enter and most never lose a dollar, and treating it as a lapse in judgement is the fastest way to end the conversation.

What you can do together is narrower. Any sweepstakes mailing that arrives is required to print a removal address or toll-free number, and the sender has sixty days to act on it. Then agree on one rule you can both say out loud: if collecting a prize costs money, there is no prize.

Sources

Matthew Delaney
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