I signed up for the Ohio Vax-A-Million vaccine lottery at ohiovaxamillion.com, even though the site and domain registration seemed a little suspicious. I verified it was the one linked from various news sites and even ohio.gov. However:
- It’s not a
.govdomain, though perhaps they didn’t want to go through all the hoops required for that - It was registered on GoDaddy, whereas ohiolottery.com, for instance, is using Network Solutions
- It has whois privacy enabled, hiding who registered it
- It was registered on May 13th, a day after the lottery was announced
- It is behind Cloudflare, so we can’t even figure out the server IP or anything like that
- The site doesn’t appear to share any significant branding or the like with ohio.gov or ohiolottery.com
The only signal that it’s legitimate is the legitimate sites that link to it. Perhaps we’ll all find out that this was a scam of some sort, or that our data was stolen because the quickly thrown together site was hacked, or something. But anyway, the information required is name, address, birthday, phone, and email, which can probably already be found elsewhere on the internet. So I went ahead.
In all truth, I don’t really need a million dollars (or whatever that comes to after taxes). Aside from some health issues, I am mostly doing alright. I don’t really want the publicity of being the winner, especially if I have to go in front of a crowd and accept a giant novelty check or something like that. But with it, I could:
- Throw gobs of money at my health problems in hopes that helps fix them
- Give money to family members, who may want it more
- Give money to some health related charities to go towards fixing other peoples’ health problems too
- Get some things I’ve been reluctant to buy but would like, replace some old stuff, get things fixed, etc
- Put a bunch of money in the stock market so I’ll have gains and dividends to make myself more comfortable for the rest of my life
So, might as well.