ComplaintsforOmaze

• Initial Complaint

  07/09/2023

  Complaint Type:

  Customer Service Issues

  Status:

  Unanswered

  More info

  I was told i had wo. The f250 but then got hacked right afterwards, and when i check black list records it says omaze has me blacklisted under errata. I just wanna know what happen for you guys to do all this to me. I get it i dont win thats fine... .just why did it happen like this. *** tried to ask you several times now im at the BBB and trying yet again. If im label by you as errata that means you are the one who hacked me because nobody else would have listed that, because i called the police when i was hacked. I didnt know how to handle that scenario. Either way im not try to *** im just wondering why you did it like you did? What did i do? You have me label as abuse a blackilist errata!!! Please explain.

• Initial Complaint

  12/26/2022

  Complaint Type:

  Customer Service Issues

  Status:

  Unanswered

  More info

  I have a non profit that matches OMAZE's criteria for partnering with them and have reached out several times to see if we could use their platform to create a sweepstakes experience. Several weeks and months passed and no answer... So I decided to reach out to what they advertise as their "donor-advised" funds such as CAF, Global Impact and looks like all of these are just created to give a sense of accountability, however, it is impossible to reach out to anyone at any OMAZE or affiliate organization. CAF actually said they were ending their relationship with OMAZE at the end of 2023. I will keep digging to get to the bottom of who OMAZE is. I think they are shady and having ZERO customer service or response to requests prove that.

  Business response

  01/12/2023

  Our apologies that a member of our CX team couldn't reply to you sooner; we've been receiving a much higher than normal email volume. We can assure you that all of our sweepstakes experiences have always been 100% real. We understand your concerns and hope we can clear up any confusion.
  
  Omaze was founded a decade ago and has since grown into an organization that has raised nearly $200 million for charities in ***************** and around the world. In partnership with our charity clients, ************************ *******, ********************** and Global Impact, we've raised funds that have supported over 350 charities. Thanks to our incredible community of donors, Omaze's experiences have raised enough to build an entire teen center in ************, **********, a children's hospice center in ******, and much more.
  
  We are not currently taking on new charitable beneficiaries for Omaze.com, but we always welcome the opportunity to learn about organizations we have not yet supported.
  
  We sincerely appreciate your interest in Omaze and thank you for the incredible work you do each and every single day.

  Customer response

  01/18/2023

  (The consumer indicated he/she DID NOT accept the response from the business.)
  I have contacted all of your charity clients which are just processing funds. And CAF said they won't work with in 2023. You say you want to "hear more about our work" ... How? You have zero interest in fundraising other than the outrages fees you collect.I am writing a broader article to expose you.

• Initial Complaint

  11/16/2022

  Complaint Type:

  Customer Service Issues

  Status:

  Answered

  More info

  I have donated to OMAZE many times in the past, but recently on an online Internet forum, it was found that Omaze is legally obligated to allows free entries without any donation or purchase. Therefore, it is possible for someone to enter for free, each time granting you 2,000 entries, capped at 6,000, which is the equivalent of someone paying $300 or so for paid entries. The concern came up that those using the free entry method were not being entered into the raffle, or that the free entries are not weighed the same as paid entries? How can we confirm this? Has OMAZE been audited to see if they are correctly entering all of the entries, free or paid, in their sweepstakes equally? Is there any information the company can provide to confirm this?

  Business response

  12/09/2022

  Business Response /* (1000, 5, 2022/11/22) */ Thanks for reaching out, we'd be more than happy to address your concerns. There are indeed two ways to enter for a chance to win our sweepstakes experiences. The first is by making a donation on an experience page through the Omaze platform. As a gift with your donation, you'll receive entries into the associated sweepstakes experience. The second is through the Alternative Method of Entry (AMOE), with no purchase or donation necessary. To find the link to the AMOE form, navigate to the experience page of your choice on omaze.com. Then, scroll down to directly underneath the donation level options. There you will see a link to "enter without contributing" located in the center of the page. For experiences on Omaze.com, each AMOE form submitted gets you 2,000 entries to the affiliated sweepstakes experience. For experiences on Omaze.com, the maximum number of entries of any kind allowed per person per single sweepstakes is 6,000 entries, regardless of the method of entry. We've worked carefully with our Legal Team to set these entry numbers and create the best experience possible for all users, but we always welcome feedback. We can assure you that all entries are weighted equally in the random drawing process. If you login to your account under the email used to donate and/or submit your entries online, you will see your entry counts listed on the "Your Experiences" tab of your account. Once you reach the maximum number of entries allowed per person for an experience, you will see "MAX" displayed next to your entry count. For each omaze.com Grand Prize sweepstakes experience, a potential winner is drawn using a proprietary process based on industry standards to ensure that each drawing is conducted completely at random. Our draw engine has been certified by ************************************************* is an industry leader in providing independent testing and inspection of electronic gaming products. A random number is generated from entropy present in the operating system running the code. This number is cryptographically secure. Every entrant's entries into an experience gets assigned a unique entry range. (For example, if you have 100 entries, you could have entries 0-99, while another person could have entries *******.) We then tell our *** to select a number between 0 and however many total entries there are in a given experience, and it picks a number at random. Every single entry has an equal chance of being drawn. Once this is completed, our system matches the corresponding entry to the number drawn and our**** returns a list of potential winners. At no time does any member of Omaze see the winning number to ensure the sweepstakes cannot be tampered with. That way, we don't know any information about a potential winner until they're drawn. Then comes the fun part, when we get to tell them the good news! You can learn more about the winner confirmation and verification process in our Official Rules. If you have any further questions, our CX team would be happy to answer them via email at ********************

• Initial Complaint

  11/14/2022

  Complaint Type:

  Customer Service Issues

  Status:

  Answered

  More info

  SPAM EMAIL PRACTICES CAN-SPAM VIOLATION! I used to donate to Omaze for a while but after not ever winning I decided that I no longer felt like supporting them. So I unsubscribed to their emails using their link and was taken to a website that said I would no longer receive their emails. Since then (it has been over a month) I have received many daily emails from them! So I tried reporting them as SPAM from within my gmail account, because this usually works and Gmail will just send them to my spam folder. NOPE! Every day 2-3 emails of more each day keep coming in! So then I tried Blocking their emails from within Gmail. This STILL DID NOT WORK!!! So then I resorted to sending them an email through their customer support feature asking them to please remove my email from their list. NO RESPONSE! And there was not even an acknowledgement from them that they received my submission. A week later and I still receive 3 or more emails each and every darn day!! So they are using technology to bypass the Spam trap and the Blocking features to get into the email accounts of people who no longer want to hear from them. This is ILLEGAL!!! They take no responsibility nor have they tried to help me remedy this situation. I just don't want their stunning emails anymore!! OMAZE IS A SCAM!!

  Business response

  12/02/2022

  Business Response /* (1000, 5, 2022/11/18) */ We can assure you that Omaze is 100% legitimate. We take complaints very seriously, and would be happy to look into this for. However, we do not have a record of the email used to make this complaint in our email messaging system or customer service platform. Please keep in mind that if you have subscribed under another email address that is set to forward to this one, that that email address would need to be unsubscribed separately. If you can please email [email protected] from the email address at which you've been receiving our promotional messages and mention this BBB complaint, we can help to get things resolved for you ASAP.

• Initial Complaint

  11/08/2022

  Complaint Type:

  Product Issues

  Status:

  Answered

  More info

  I recently donated on omaze and a few days after had realized that the credits had not show up in my donation history. After I had realized what happened I had taken to the help center on omaze to see how to initiate a refund on omaze. I couldn't find anything explaining how to get a refund in the help center or online, only a couple things telling me that I could but not how. Shortly after I emailed customer service to ask about a refund but have not gotten any answers in multiple days. All I would like is a full refund.

  Business response

  11/23/2022

  Business Response /* (1000, 5, 2022/11/09) */ We can see that a member of our team has replied to the customer and issued a refund as of November 9th. Please note that it may take 3-5 business days for the funds to appear back within the customer's account, depending on their bank or credit lender.

• Initial Complaint

  08/26/2022

  Complaint Type:

  Customer Service Issues

  Status:

  Resolved

  More info

  I have been donating to Omaze and have recently discovered that part of my entries are not showing in my account.. my most recent donation was on or around August 13, 2022.. I believe what has happened is that I've donated using two different email accounts.. I might have inadvertently used both accounts.. now, my entries are only showing up on one account and I know I've donated more than the total amount showing in my account.. I have sent at least 8 emails and have not received any response.. I do not know how else to reach out to them and the donations end on Aug 26, 2022.. please advise on what to do as I don't want to lose that money.. I've listed both email addresses and phone number.. *********************** (this has entries) ******************* (this one is missing) This one (bottom one is the email I currently use) ************ Thank you so much, ************

  Business response

  09/08/2022

  Business Response /* (1000, 5, 2022/09/01) */ Hello ******, Thank you for giving us an opportunity to work with you. My name is **** and I'm the Manager of Customer Experience here at Omaze. I can see that you've spoken with our Customer Experience team several times in the last couple of months, including most recently following the email that you sent on August 30th. It looks like the agent that helped you was able to resolve the issue to your satisfaction. If you have any additional questions or need further assistance, please don't hesitate to reach back out to us at [email protected]. Business Response /* (-10, 6, 2022/09/01) */ ***Document Attached*** The customer has used two email addresses to contact our team. For the first of the two emails, their yahoo address, they first wrote to us on June 9th asking for assistance with a promo code. Our team was unfamiliar with the issue the customer described, so we asked for more information. Our reply was sent the same day, June 9th. The customer came back to us on June 10th asking if there was somewhere that they could see if their promo code was applied correctly. Our team replied on June 13th explaining how the free Alternative Method of Entry works on our site, how to check their entry counts via their account and sent instructions for how to activate their account, should they wish to do so. It does look like there may have been some confusion regarding which account the customer was enquiring about. The customer had did not let our team know at this time that they had two accounts, so all the agent had to go off of was the account associated with the email from which they'd contacted us. Then, on June 12th, they wrote to us stating that they were experiencing an issue logging in. Our team replied on June 14th and asked for additional information to help troubleshoot on our end. We heard back from the customer on June 15th. Our team asked a further clarifying question of the customer on June 19th. They then wrote to us again on June 21st saying, "Please disregard my email re: bonus entries.. ******* Our team let the customer know that we were glad that they could now access their account and to please let us know in the future should they need any further assistance. Next, the customer sent the following: "I need help... I've reached out numerous times and I have not received any responses... I have made a complaint to ***.. Thank you" despite having been helped by our team in the past several times. A member of our team replied the same day with the following: "Thanks for reaching out to us here at Omaze! We are sorry to hear your frustration and hope we can help you here today. We see that you were conversing with one of our agents back in June. Based on this past correspondence, it looks like you were questioning whether the ********** promo code applied to any of your donations successfully. We do sincerely apologize that this question was never addressed. We can confirm that promo codes were redeemed successfully on all three of your donations and your free submissions as well. On Donation ********************************************************************************************************************* was applied successfully. And on Donation ************************************* was applied successfully. Our platform does not show us which promo code was applied to your free submissions, but we see that one for 50 additional entries was applied with each of your submissions on June 9th. Only one promo code can be accepted per transaction, so if you did enter ********** on any of these transactions it would not have applied because a promo code was already being redeemed. Hopefully this helps address your question. We would also like to mention, that it looks like you have not completed the account activation process for your Omaze account linked to ******************** Once this is complete you will be able to review all of your donation details and entry counts in your account dashboard. To access your account, please navigate to the "Sign Up" page of our site here. There you'll see two options: "Log in" and "Sign up". Make sure that you have "Sign up" selected, fill in your email address and the password you wish to use, then hit the yellow "Sign up" button. You'll then receive an email that contains a link that will allow you to complete the account activation! The subject line of the email is "Verify your email for Omaze". The link will be valid for 24 hours. If you aren't seeing this message in your inbox, please check your spam and/or promotional folders to ensure that your email server didn't mistakenly mark the message as "junk"! Additionally, we would recommend clearing your cache and cookies before using the link. If you have any other questions, please let us know. We're here and happy to help! Warmly, Team Omaze" The customer replied the same day with the following: "Dear ********,I received ur email and I followed the directions... all I can say is Thank you, Thank you, Thank you..I was so stressed and of course, I should have known it was something I did.. Again thx so much!!" From the second of the two emails, their ********l address, the customer wrote to us on June 16th and June 19th asking for assistance with their login. Since a member of our team had an open ticket with the user at their other address during this time, they went ahead and merged these two tickets into the open ticket. As indicated above, the customer's most recent message from August 30th indicates that they are satisfied with the assistance that they received. That being said, I've asked the member of our team that spoke with the customer again most recently to follow up once again.

• Initial Complaint

  02/03/2022

  Complaint Type:

  Customer Service Issues

  Status:

  Answered

  More info

  Hello, I have donated for several years to Omaze campaigns and recommended the site to my friends and family. The issue at hand arose several days ago when I discovered that the email under my maiden name ************************ was the contact info in Omaze - despite my legal name of ***** ******* being the contact name. I reached out and let them know that I had been married for 5 years and needed to update my contact email in the off chance I actually won something - pretty reasonable I thought. There is no phone number to reach them, so everything was done through email. We discovered that my account through Omaze is a sign in through ********, but I had accidentally set up a separate login with my married name email with Omaze thinking I had just forgotten my password. The login I accidentally created on the Omaze website had no entries - it was completely unused. All of my donations and existing entries were through my ********-attached login with the maiden name email. I logged into ******** and changed my email (apparently that was the problem) and didn't think anything else of it. Until today - I logged into Omaze to enter for another prize (with my ******** login, and it showed the correct email) and there is nothing. No current entries, no donation history, nothing. EVERYTHING is missing. I had a couple thousand entries on drawings that are happening in just a few days. So I have spent ******** of dollars on the Omaze foundation, so that everything I have given could be deleted? I emailed in immediately this morning. Haven't heard back. Messaged on ******** - haven't read my message. Found a number online to their office - no one answered. So no one will contact me, they have deleted everything over a simple email change, and I would really like it fixed. Thank you for your help! ***** *******

  Business response

  02/24/2022

  Business Response /* (1000, 5, 2022/02/04) */ Hello *****, Thank you for reaching out to us. My name is ******, Director of Customer Experience here at Omaze. I first want to apologize for the delay in replying to your email that you sent into us. I do see an agent replied to your email earlier today. If you need any further assistance or have any other questions, please feel free to reach out to us at ********************

• Initial Complaint

  01/14/2022

  Complaint Type:

  Customer Service Issues

  Status:

  Answered

  More info

  This company is a scam. It has insider winning and does not pay out to the charities. If i had known this was a scam website I would NOT have paid anything to this company.

  Business response

  02/04/2022

  Business Response /* (1000, 5, 2022/01/21) */ Thank you for giving us this opportunity to speak to some misconceptions people have about the incredible work we are able to do because of our incredible Omaze Community. My name is ****** and I'm the Senior Manager of Customer Experience at Omaze. We can assure you that all of our sweepstakes experiences are 100% real. We understand your concerns and hope we can clear up any confusion. Omaze tries to make giving fun and easy for donors, and we appreciate your feedback on how to continue to deliver on this mission. Omaze experiences have raised enough to build an entire teen center in ************************, a children's hospice center in the **, and much more. In partnership with Charities Aid Foundation America, we've supported over 350 beneficiaries by delivering much needed funds, none of which would have been possible without the support of our incredible donors. You can take a look at some of the incredible impact the Omaze community has made at the bottom of our homepage:**********************/ under the section entitled, "You've raised over $**** to support nonprofits!". Sometimes it's helpful to check out the "About Us" page ************************************ of our website for more details on how our business works, and we also recommend exploring our ******* page ********************************************************, where you'll see some of Omaze's wonderful celebrity partners, past and present non-profit beneficiaries, and winner experiences over the past five years. You can also check out the "Winners" section of our site here ***************************************** where you can opt to view closed experiences sorted by the month in which we announced the winner(s). Clicking into each specific experience page will show you who won the experience in question. We guarantee that all of our sweepstakes are 100% real and can assure you that all of our winners are in fact real people who have all been drawn completely at random! If you search #ithappened in conjunction with "Omaze" on ******* or ********, you can take a look at photos or posts from our winners that they have granted us permission to share on our platform. One of our winners from 2019 (of the ********************************* experience) even did a ********** about his experience! Per Section 4 of our Official Rules ****************************rules, any employees, officers, and/or directors of Omaze, the Charities supported by the applicable sweepstake experience (including, without limitation, CAF America), Omaze's third-party contractors who participate in or provide services related to the random drawing process for the applicable experience, and any contractor or other partner engaged by Omaze to supply and/or fulfill any portion of the Prize, including, without limitation, any Prize supply partners, are not eligible to enter or win any experience. Additionally, the immediate family members of (meaning, spouse, parent, child, sibling, and their respective spouses, regardless of where they reside) and/or those living in the same household as the employees, officers and/or directors of Omaze and/or the Charities (excluding Charity volunteers) supported by the applicable experience (whether or not related) are also ineligible to enter or win. All of our winners are drawn completely at random so our team has no say in who will be drawn. . Last but not least, Omaze was recently named as one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2020! You can check out their article on Omaze on their website here *************************************************************************** We're always looking to improve, and we appreciate your feedback. If you have any additional questions about how our model works, we'd be happy to address them.

• Initial Complaint

  01/11/2022

  Complaint Type:

  Product Issues

  Status:

  Answered

  More info

  I made a donation of $25 which I thought was going directly to ******** charity for children with cancer. After I received an email stating it was charities ********************** and not knowing if this will go directly to **************** for children, I would like a full refund so I can send this donation directly to ****************** for children. Thank you.

  Business response

  02/02/2022

  Business Response /* (1000, 5, 2022/01/19) */ Hello ****, Thanks for giving us this opportunity to speak to our model and how donations work through Omaze. My name is ******, Senior Manager of Customer Experience at Omaze. Donations made through our site go directly to Charities Aid Foundation America (*** America), a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt public charity. *** ******* has partnered with Omaze to make giving internationally and domestically safe, easy and effective for U.S. donors by raising charitable donations from members of the public to fund monetary grants to other charitable organizations. In accordance with the terms of our sweepstakes, so long as the beneficiary/beneficiaries specified for each sweepstakes remain eligible to receive grants when the sweepstakes ends, *** ******* will provide the net proceeds from the sweepstakes to the designated beneficiary as a charitable grant. The designated beneficiary for each experience is listed on the individual experience pages! Since you were unaware of our model, we've gone ahead and refunded your donation in full. Please allow 3-5 business days for the funds to be returned to you. If you have any other questions, always feel free to email us at *******************

• Initial Complaint

  10/15/2021

  Complaint Type:

  Customer Service Issues

  Status:

  Answered

  More info

  I've joined one of Omaze's reward programs ("Win Two Seats on One of the FIRST Virgin Galactic Flights to Space"). The program consists in donating a certain amount for having the chance of a prize draw. This draw was supposed to be released on September 29th, but no winners were announced so far *********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************** After 2 weeks, the winner is pending and we don't know who won the prize. I want clarity on the results and the winner must be published as soon as possible, otherwise, I want a refund for the amounts spent on that campaign.

  Business response

  02/17/2022

  Business Response /* (1000, 5, 2021/10/19) */ Hello *******, Thank you for giving us this opportunity to speak with you. My name is ******, Senior Manager of Customer Experience here at Omaze. The Virgin Galactic experience is one of the biggest prizes we've ever offered, and we want to announce the winner in an even bigger way than we normally do. We do apologize if this caught you off guard, but we're excited to do something extra special for this experience. We're looking forward to introducing you to the winner, so keep an eye out for more on the reveal. Please let us know if you have any other questions.

*Some consumers may elect to not publish the details of their complaints, some complaints may not meet BBB's standards for publication, or BBB may display a portion of complaints when a high volume is received for a particular business. ↩