If you work in marketing and you run contests or sweepstakes for clients, you will inevitably interact with a sweeper. At Gossip Genie, we appreciate sweepers that participate in our promotions and play fair.
However, a true sweeper will stop at nothing to win and lives off of free products. A day in the life of a professional sweeper is sitting in front of a computer and entering hundreds of promotions, sending complaints to companies when they can find a loop-hole in the rules and demanding free product in exchange for the error.
The Profile of a Sweeper
Often times sweepers are coping with empty nest syndrome, a recent divorce and/or boredom. Many sweepers are overweight, lower-middle class women ages 45 – 65 living in the suburbs and many of them are named Shirley. A sweeper never wears makeup but her hair is always freshly done from a trip to the beauty shop. This type of woman usually goes one of two routes, the Catfish route or the Sweeper route. Today we are profiling sweepers.
The Mentality of a Sweeper
Sweepers ignore winner announcements unless their name is on the list. Instead, they send messages asking for specifics as to how winners were chosen as well as demanding a reward for entering. Often times, a sneaky sweeper will send a message via email, tweet or Facebook claiming that they never received their prize for a contest that ended many months ago. We are very thorough in our tracking process and never once has the name of the person inquiring matched the winners we chose.
The Behavior of a Sweeper
Sweepers will also enter contests from different computers on different networks to appear to have a different ip address (library or Best Buy) under different names (mother’s maiden name) and addresses (using a neighbor’s address or the local beauty shop). The more entries, the more opportunities to win. Promotions that do not restrict the number of times a person can enter are a sweeper’s dream.
Don’t be fooled by the smiling faces, these women will stop at nothing when it comes to winning.
