Be Wary of Videos and Websites That Promise "Hacks" for Free Sweepstakes

24 Aug 2022

Be Wary of Videos and Websites That Promise "Hacks" for Free Sweepstakes

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Sorry to say, but there’s no such thing as free money. Believing there is can make you a target.

Sure, taking advantage of a no deposit offer for an online casino or sportsbook might give you a little bit of credit to play with. But that’s a marketing pitch. The site wants you to stick around and gamble with your own money next.

If someone’s promising you free money with nothing in it for them, there’s a good chance you’re getting scammed.

That’s the case when it comes to the sweeps casino cheats and hacks going around. You might find them through a Google search or see them promoted in YouTube videos. Either way, they’ll tell you that all you need to do is visit a website and push some buttons, and you’ll get infinite free Sweeps coins on Chumba, Funzpoints, Luckyland Slots, or any other such site.

Before we get into the specifics of the current scams, let’s take a look at why this doesn’t pass the sniff test.

If you’re not a computer person, it might seem plausible on the surface. After all, cheats do exist for other types of games. In almost all cases, however, these involve making changes to software running on your own device.

Online casino games have a fundamentally different design for security reasons. The game’s outcome is decided by the company’s computers, without your device being involved at all. All your phone or computer is doing is showing you the result.

Likewise, important information such as your points balance is also stored on those computers. There’s no way to change it from your end. That’s true for both real money casinos and sweepstakes casinos.

Think about it this way: You can have a phone consultation with your doctor, but they can’t do surgery on you that way. Trying to hack an online casino without access to the company computers would be like trying to do surgery over the phone.

Hypothetically, it’s possible but unlikely for a hacker to discover a security hole and get back-end access to an online casino’s servers. But here we go back to the “no free money” principle.

If a hacker had such access, they could use it to make money for themselves. Putting it on the internet so you can use it would only increase their chances of getting caught. Why would they do that with no upside for themselves? The answer is: They wouldn’t.

Bonus has noticed some visits to our site from users searching for such cheats. We were curious as to why people thought this was possible and did some searching of our own.

It turns out that there are several sites claiming to offer such cheats and YouTube videos pointing you to those sites. We won’t link to them because we don’t want to provide them with extra traffic. However, we did dig into one example to get to the bottom of how the scam works.

One YouTube video appears under this title. It presents itself as an unnarrated video tutorial with some high-energy dubsteb music playing in the background.

It shows a web browser into which the user types the URL for a particular “cheat” site. This leads to a blog-style site with a series of articles offering various supposed hacks to get free stuff.

The user types “chumba casino” into the on-site search box and clicks the article that pops up. Scrolling to the bottom of the article, they find a large blue button reading Use Chumba Casino Sweeps Hack.

Clicking that brings up a screen that looks like the image on the right. It claims to be a Resources Generator and asks for the user’s Chumba login and platform.

The site then appears to try to connect to Chumba Casino and brings up some buttons to select the number of Sweeps to add to the user’s account. Naturally, the user selects the maximum (1000) and hits a button that says Generate.

Another progress box pops up with technical-sounding messages like “preparing to inject data packets” before claiming to have successfully added the Sweeps to the selected account.

Finally, it claims to be “performing automatic human verification” and fails at this step.

At that point, the video cuts to the supposed results. It shows the user’s Chumba account, with the Sweeps balance increasing from 2 to 1,002.

If you’re thinking that the scam must happen right after the “automatic verification” fails, you’ve guessed correctly!

Following the same steps in the video (but using a fake username), Bonus discovered what happens after the video cuts.

At this point, the site claims that it needs to verify that you’re a human and not a bot. Instead of using a typical Captcha (e.g., “click all squares showing a boat”), it asks you to sign up for several free offers or fill out surveys (for which it claims you’ll be paid).

Somehow, applying for a $50 Roblox gift card or a Disney+ trial membership is supposed to prove you’re not a robot?

Naturally, each of these supposed offers asks you to provide some personal information. And, of course, you don’t get your gift at the end of it, just more things to sign up for. Each of these asks for more information, promises you more things, and adds additional steps to the process.

We stopped feeding the website fake information after a few such steps, but there’s probably no end to it. These trial offer and survey scams are well-known ploys. The scammers will keep teasing you with supposed freebies and asking you for more information until you wise up.

Ultimately, they’ll use whatever you’ve given them to spam you, target you for more scams, and guess your security questions for websites. If they get your credit card information out of you (to cover “shipping fees,” for instance), you’ll likely start to see fraudulent charges appear.

Sadly, the dream of just clicking to get unlimited free Sweeps is just that: a dream.

However, there are a couple of ways to get a small number of Sweeps without directly paying for them. The first is through signup bonuses. Sweepstakes casinos have these just like real money casinos do.

For instance: Sign up for Funzpoints and get 250 Premium points.

You can find more such offers on our sweepstakes casino page.

But these are one-time offers. What if you’ve already signed up for every sweepstakes casino you can find? There’s some good news and some bad news here.

The good news is that these sites operate under federal sweepstakes laws. One of the features of those laws is that there’s a “no purchase necessary” requirement. If you ask the company to participate, they have to let you do it for free.

The bad news is that they don’t really want you to do this, so they make it difficult. After all, the Sweeps can be exchanged for real money, and as we said up front, no one actually wants to give you free money.

To request free Sweeps from one of these sites, you must find the relevant part of their Terms & Conditions and follow the instructions precisely. This will mean writing your request out by hand, in a particular way, on a specific size of paper, and sending it in by mail in a stamped envelope.

If you do that, they have to give you some free Sweeps. It won’t be very many, however; unless you have a lot of time on your hands, it’ll be more trouble than it’s worth. Still, if you want free Sweeps without getting scammed, that’s how you do it.