Soliciting Feedback, thoughts, ideas, etc.
A recent AZ raffle was "won" by a non-AZer. Apparently the raffle owner allowed this person to buy slots off of AZ.
I didn't realize it was a non-AZer until the same name popped up on another raffle, and another AZer asked the question I had - "who is this person"?
The raffle owner replied and stated it's a non-AZer. Buying raffle slots.
But no record.
Here is my reply: This is a major concern for me. When this same person, Ms Mickey, won one of your earlier raffles, I couldn't find her here to congratulate her.
Opening raffles up to "friends" who are not AZer is unacceptable, in my book. Not a reflection of you personally, but that really opens the door to corruption.
One could, theoretically, have a few of their friends "buy slots", then if they win they could, theoretically, tell their friend to keep the cue. That money never really exchanged hands. Who's to say these "friends" even exist??
So you get all the other raffle money and the cue.
The entire purpose of doing these in this format, with AZers publicly committing to buy slots, was to avoid this exact problem.
Selling raffle slots to friends off of AZ. Wow. There goes the entire check & balance system that we had, be it ever so fragile.
How do we know these ghosts even exist?
Since most raffles proceeds are far greater than the current market value of the cue, the raffle owner still comes out ahead when a real person (AZer) wins.
So a mystery friend/ghost/phantom "buys" 4-5 slots. Now the raffle owner has 10% chance of getting the money AND keeping cue. Worse case is, someone else wins and the cue is shipped, still getting top dollar for the cue.
Well, that's it for me and Raffles!
-von