Thursday, March 23, 2017

Publisher's Clearing House, Pirate's Cheating House




Publisher's Clearing House, in combination with the unsettled economy, has me trapped.

Do I want $7,000 a week for life? Yes. Do I want $100,000? Yes.

Are either of these prizes headed my way? Of course not. Nor, in all probability,  are they en route to anyone anywhere.



What or who is Publisher's Clearing House? I do not know, but it should not be too difficult to find out.  It used to mail out bundles of complicated and sparkly forms to fill out for the chance to win huge sums of money.

Ed MacMahon would appear at the winner's house with an enormous check. 

Many people thoughts subscribing to a magazine through PCH would increase their chance of winning. Read the rules, however, and you find that no purchase is necessary.

Funny story: On my iPhone relatively recently I played a PCH slot machine game and won $3,000. I took a screen shot just to prove, sort of, that this happened. I'm not holding my breath.


My impression is that if paying did influence the "game" the whole business might be considered gambling, or wire fraud, or some other felonious operation.

I recently began to play PCH games on my phone. The amount of mail I receive from PCH has gone way up. I need to enter this, I need to submit that. Last night all I wanted to do was sleep, but I felt it necessary to play endless hands of blackjack a la PCH for "tokens" that don't seem to be worth anything.








The occasionally explicit idea is that playing the games enters your name in PCH's great give away of  thousands or millions of dollars. 

Even if I am entering these lotteries, the odds of me winning are so small as to be zero. If I liked to gamble I would have a much greater chance of winning at a casino or racetrack. 

So I continue to waste time on these dopy PCH games, based on the belief that although the chance is almost zero, I might be able to win $5,000 a week for the rest of my life. Someone will win, after all. Just not any particular person. 

It's the law of big numbers and seems paradoxical. If someone must win, why not me? Suppose the odds of winning are 1 in 100 million. Someone will win, but the chances of any person winning are 1 in 100 million, which might as well be zero.

At any rate, PCH has morphed into an applications company. Visit the app store if you have nothing more productive to do and you will find several PCH "games," which are similar to casino-type games. They include roulette and slot machine games.

PCH claims that if you play their free games you could win money. Philosophically speaking, they mean that winning money is a contingent reality, that is, that result does not violate any physical laws. People who have downloaded these games and have left reviews, suggest that though they have played long hours, none has won anything.

That's because Publisher's Clearing House is a phantom organization. Do you know anyone who has ever won a dime from PCH? Neither do I.

My sense is that PCH may actually award prizes, but it does so in a secretive manner and does not go to great lengths to locate winners.

I imagine them going to someone's address, ringing the bell, and if no one answers within 30 seconds, they leave and the prize money goes to PCH.

Is it a seller of magazine subscriptions and cheap merchandise, or inexplicable games that promise enormous wealth, or a game developer? It may be all of those, or it may be a cabal of criminals based in Siberia.





Anyone know any of these people? Are they actors?