They’re always advertising “you could win this house” and “it’s for charity” – is it all just a scam?
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It’s like a lottery but with a more specific prize. Lotteries work by taking in more money than they give out. If 100 people pay $1 each to play the lottery, you might award a $75 jackpot and keep the remaining $25 (in fact, most lotteries are run by the government and used to fund public services, so they have roughly the same end result as Omaze – the surplus money goes to ” a good cause”). This means that lotteries are generally a bad deal because people who play them will lose money on average.
In the case of Omaze, instead of getting a lot of money that you could spend on a house if you want, you just get the house. So Omaze is only a scam in the sense that it’s a lottery, though that shouldn’t be a shock. Of course the charity drive is going to be a financial loss for its participants. But if you’re suspicious that the promised prizes were never awarded, there’s no evidence that Omaze was that kind of scam. With that said, it bears mentioning that Omaze is a “for-profit fundraising company,” which means that it has no obligation to direct all of the surplus money to charity. Some of that money goes to the owner just because he feels like it.
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