Is this legal?

I have an online arcade and one of my plans for advertising or promoting is this....

Hold a contest in which contestants pay $1.00..... they play whichever game is being used for the contest and take a screen shot of their final score.... the winner will receive about half of the money that I get from entrance fees..... Is this legal?

 

Pretty sure it would fall under UIGEA regulations, so no, not likely legal in the US in my opinion.

 

Illegal?!!! it's weird how americans are law-paranoid
I can't see why this is illegal

~yoozy

 

That would be gambling since your charging to play. The players would have to be 18 + and would need to verify their age.

 

And what about if there was no entrance fee?

 

Then it's completely legal.

 

I agree with this post. If you are charging people a fee, it's gambling.

 

Alrighty... sounds good thanks everyone

 

anyway screen shot can be edited , can't trust screen shots.

 

Although it's good to get the opinion of others in the same field - such as on this forum - to get a feel for what people think, for matters that concern legal issues however...wouldn't it be more advisable to get professional legal advice from somewhere?

 

Yeah I think so that there's a gambling idea on it..
but I don't know if they would hit it as an illegal but I don't see anything
that is illegal about that thing

 

It depend to your country law. This is consider as gambling too

 

Its is legal if you have license from authority to collect money from public.

 

Wells, I would say it depend on some state's law, but screenshot wouldn't be a good proof too since it's very easy to edit it. If you have a good programmer, you can write a source code to connect from the site result to your database, then store the score in it.

Cheer

 

yap, me too agree with you.can't trust screen shots.

 

Donations...... they donate to the site and play for free. You get around the laws then as that is not gambling.

 

your site is NOT even close to big enough. you are wasting your time with this. you need to build your website first then try to make money later. arcade owners that start off their website with tons of adds etc. always fail.

 

I'll have to agree with Foland. You need to build your website first.

 

Agree with others, you'll need a scoreboard or ranking program to have accurate results - otherwise a quick photoshop and I could have the top score

 

couldnt it just be a membership site, $1 to join and $1 a month thereafter, each month you give away half to the winner. that way you can easily have them tell friends... the more people join, the more money they have the chance to win