Category: Fundraising

You’ve Won! Or have you? Is RaffleWinner#33 Performance Art, Prank, or Fraud?

There’s a puzzling fraud that’s been going on using the Erowid name. Beginning in 2018 and continuing through 2020, several people have emailed Erowid trying to claim a prize they ‘won’ through an alleged Erowid raffle ticket. Yet Erowid hasn’t participated in nor offered a raffle of any sort in more than a decade. These raffle tickets were not issued by Erowid Center and there is no prize to be claimed.


Inside of the fake Erowid raffle ticket card.

So far, we have limited details. What we know…

  • The so-called ‘tickets’ appear to be a collage based on a photocopy of an old (actual) Erowid raffle from the Mind States 2008 conference with the addition of a 2009-era Erowid logo.
  • A couple of people have specified that they received it by (snail)mail. One person said it was left “in a card at their door”. (eek!)
  • In at least one case it was pasted inside a greeting card style card with a cover that had “gefeliciteerd” (Dutch for ‘congratulations’) on it.
Cover of one of the fake Erowid
winning raffle tickets.
  • The cards bear a ‘WinnersCode’, referred to as ‘RaffleWinner#33’.
  • One person claims they won “because of a donation”, and the card itself says “thank you for your generous donation to Erowid”

    • These tickets are not related in any way to bona fide donations made to Erowid Center. It has been suggested that it might be a research chemical vendor that is sending them out with purchases, but we haven’t been able to verify that (or which vendor). Erowid definitely isn’t involved in whatever transactions happened prior to the arrival of these cards.

    We’d love any help in tracking down what’s going on so we can try to reduce confusion!

    Comments:

    Swan Nov 2, 2020: I don’t know if you already know this info, but NamasteLSD is sending these with whatever you buy from him, im sure its just a prank.

    RobbyRob : Nov 13, 2020 : Hi Guys, maybe it is a bit late or not interessing anymore, but i got one of you “Winner tickets” also and i can verify that (at least partially) a vendor is using them. Best Greetings

    Successful September Drive – Thanks

    Thanks to all who helped by donating, spreading the word, or working on the site! Erowid got 1,240 donations in September, the most ever in a single month. We’re still finalizing some of the donations, there are always some that get reversed and have to be removed, but we probably have a few mailed-in checks that haven’t gotten into the number either.

    Median donation size was, once again, $10. 316 donations on the last day of the drive and 779 donations in the last five days.

    Another Revision of Bitcoin Transaction Importer

    Most bitcoin donations to Erowid come in very small amounts and not super often. But, ever September, I need to have a daily tracking of incoming bitcoin donations to keep our daily September Drive numbers accurate.

    Otherwise, there’s no reason to do day-to-day tracking of bitcoin donations. But, each year it seems each system I use to do server-side pull and parse of bitcoin donations into our contribution tracker change format or meaning. And again this year.

    After some very generous folks contributed 45 bitcoin donations yesterday, it became clear that I needed to stop entering them manually into our contribution list and had to update the importer. So, this year, I’m using the JSON output from :

    http://webbtc.com/address/

    It took me a few hours of figuring out the differences between the different formats I’d been reading.

    So, that makes 65 bitcoin donations so far in September. Hurray!

    Sept Drive