In 1967, a magazine business that had started out of a family home on Long Island mailed its first sweepstakes. Publishers Clearing House, founded in 1953 by Harold and LuEsther Mertz and their daughter Joyce Mertz-Gilmore, wanted people to open its envelopes and order subscriptions. A prize drawing gave them a reason to tear the flap. The entry could go back in the mail with an order or without one, and that small detail carried the legal weight then. It still does.
Now move to Oct. 6, 2025, when McDonald’s brought its Monopoly game back to U.S. restaurants for the first time in nearly a decade. Some pieces came stuck to the side of a large fry box, others showed up as digital peels inside the company’s app, and the fine print repeated the old promise: no purchase necessary, and buying won’t improve your chances. Anyone who skipped the fries could ask for a game piece through a free online request form.
Close to sixty years and a jump from paper to phones separate those two moments, yet the legal frame underneath barely moved. The free route to entry still matters more than the prize, and the same structure’s move onto casino-style websites became a question New York lawmakers took up last year.
Prize, chance and the missing price of entry
American law has leaned on one three-part test for generations. A lottery has a prize, it picks winners by chance, and it asks for consideration, which usually means money but can mean anything else of value. Put all three together without legal authorization and you have an illegal lottery. Remove any one of them and the promotion becomes something else.
A sweepstakes keeps the prize and keeps the chance. What it drops is the price of entry. A skill contest goes the other way: it may charge a fee because the winner is chosen on merit, which takes chance out of the picture.
The hard part has always been deciding what counts as consideration. The Supreme Court tackled that in 1954 in FCC v. American Broadcasting Co. The Federal Communications Commission had written rules that treated radio and TV giveaway shows as illegal lotteries and put the licenses of stations airing them at risk. ABC’s Stop the Music was one of the shows at issue. Its radio version picked home contestants at random from telephone directories, phoned them during the program and asked them to name the tune that had just played.
The commission’s theory was that tuning in was the price of a chance to win. The justices rejected it. Listening at home wasn’t consideration, they found, and reading the federal ban on broadcasting lotteries so that it made such shows a crime would stretch that law “to the breaking point.” The ruling left broadcasters free to keep their giveaways on the air, as long as winning never depended on paying.
More than seventy years later, most fights over sweepstakes still circle back to that single element. Did the entrant pay, and if the sponsor says nobody had to, can it show a free path that actually works?
The free route has to be more than fine print
Promoters call that path the alternative method of entry, usually shortened to AMOE. McDonald’s even built the term into a web address: the fine print for its 2025 Monopoly game sent non-buyers to a request page at amoe.playatmcd.com. Older promotions asked for a handwritten postcard or a self-addressed stamped envelope. The format changes with the decade, but the idea doesn’t. Someone who never buys a thing must get the same shot at the same prizes as someone who does.
The Federal Trade Commission states the rule plainly in its consumer guidance on prize scams: “Real sweepstakes are free and by chance.” The agency adds that it’s illegal to require a payment or purchase to enter, or to charge for a better chance at winning.
Saying so in the fine print isn’t always enough. In June 2023 the FTC announced that Publishers Clearing House, the same company behind the 1967 mailer, would pay $18.5 million after the agency said its website and emails had led people to believe an order was needed to enter, or that ordering would improve their chances. The FTC also objected to shipping fees it said had been hidden from shoppers.
PCH denied wrongdoing, said most of its online entrants never bought anything, and described the deal as a way to avoid “the ongoing expense and distraction of litigation.” By April 2025 the company was in bankruptcy court, using a Chapter 11 case to leave direct mail and magazines behind for what it called “pure digital advertising,” still built around free-to-play prizes.
PCH had a free route all along. The FTC’s complaint was about what people believed from the pages in front of them, and a free path buried under order forms can fail even when it’s technically there.
When the model moved onto casino-style sites
Over the past decade, the same logic found its way onto websites that look and feel like online casinos. They split play across two kinds of coins: one that can be bought and is used only for fun, and a second, prize-eligible coin that the sites say is never sold and is handed out free instead.
Supporters argue that this keeps consideration away from the prize side, because nobody pays for the coin that can win something. Critics answer that slot-style play with a redeemable prize at the end looks like a casino in everything but its paperwork. Where that argument lands still depends on the state, and lawmakers and courts haven’t settled it in one direction.
New York settled it for itself. Gov. Kathy Hochul signed Senate bill S5935A on Dec. 5, 2025, and it took effect immediately. The law made it illegal to operate, conduct or promote an online sweepstakes game in the state, meaning an internet or mobile game that uses a dual-coin system, lets players exchange coins for cash or cash equivalents, or for a chance to win them, and simulates casino-style play such as slots, video poker or table games.
The law also reached past the sites themselves. It barred financial institutions, payment processors, geolocation providers, game content suppliers, platform providers and media affiliates from supporting such games in New York, and it left the State Gaming Commission to decide what counts as a dual system. New York wasn’t alone, either: trade outlet CasinoBeats counted it as the sixth state to enact some form of ban in 2025.
Readers in part of the Finger Lakes will find a familiar name on the roll call. The bill cleared the Senate 57-2 on June 11, 2025, and one of the two no votes came from Sen. Thomas O’Mara, whose 58th District takes in Schuyler, Seneca, Steuben and Yates counties among others. The Assembly passed it six days later.
Where the free route sits on a two-coin site
The FTC’s quarrel with PCH turned on whether people could see the free path, and a two-coin site faces a version of the same question, because on the model’s own logic the free route has to reach the coin a winner redeems, not just the one used for fun. On Spree Casino’s US Sweepstakes page, the two coins get separate jobs.
Chance is the easy part, since casino-style games run on it. The page describes Gold Coins, or GC, as coins for play that can’t be redeemed, and Spree Coins, or SC, as the redeemable kind, good for eligible prizes such as gift cards. The prize element, in other words, attaches to only one of the two.
Consideration is the contested element. The company’s sweepstakes rules say SC can’t be purchased, and they list free ways to collect them: registering an account, logging in daily, entering competitions on its social media accounts and joining weekly random draws. They also accept a request written by hand and sent through the mail, a direct descendant of the postcard entries older promotions used. The same rules say SC may also come with a purchase of GC, and that clause is where supporters and critics of the model part ways.
Entry also carries an age floor of 18 under the sweepstakes rules, and a state with a stricter age law moves it up. The company’s terms of service list New York among the places where it doesn’t offer its service, so New York residents are excluded from the platform altogether. For readers here, the model is something to understand, not something on offer.
What New York asks of an ordinary giveaway
None of that touches the promotions most people in the region actually run into, from a dealership’s drawing for a set of tires to a grocery chain’s holiday giveaway. When a chance promotion tied to selling a product or service announces prizes worth more than $5,000 in total, General Business Law Section 369-e applies.
The sponsor must then register the promotion with New York’s Secretary of State at least 30 days before launch. The filing gives the minimum number of prize-winning pieces, the chance of winning, the minimum value of the prizes and the rules, including the time period and the area covered, and it goes in with a $100 fee that isn’t refunded. A statement of the prizes and the rules then has to be posted prominently in every participating store and printed in all of the advertising.
The sponsor also has to prove it can pay. New York asks for either a special trust account at a bank holding enough to cover every prize or a surety bond for the full prize value, with a copy filed alongside the registration. Within 90 days after the promotion ends, the sponsor must file a list of everyone who won a prize worth more than $25 and keep its records for six months.
Skipping the filing, rigging the outcome or advertising falsely is a class B misdemeanor, and the Attorney General can go to court to stop a promotion.
Federal law adds a layer for anything sent through the mail. Since a 1999 amendment, the federal statute on sweepstakes mailings has treated a sweepstakes mailing as nonmailable unless it says, in the mailing, the rules and the entry form, that no purchase is necessary and that buying won’t improve the chance of winning. The mailing also has to name the sponsor along with an address where it can be reached.
Set the 1967 envelope next to the 2025 fry box and the pattern is plain. A sweepstakes works because the sponsor gives the chance away and pays its bills some other way, through magazines, burgers or attention. Once the free path shrinks to a footnote, or the thing on sale starts to look like the chance itself, the three-part test can stop protecting the promotion.
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