Aaron Parecki

"At least one court has held that sweepstakes with restricted eligibility requirements are legal, so long as the requirements are wholly unrelated to the payment of consideration. In other words, if the sweepstakes is limited to individuals who had responded to earlier mailings by purchasing products and the customers were not lead to believe that they must purchase products in order to enter the sweepstakes, there is no consideration. That court found that if the sweepstakes had only one eligibility requirement — that the entrant be a past customer — the customer-only sweepstakes did not hinge on the payment of consideration, and such a sweepstakes would not be illegal."