GERMANY CALLING: WORLD CUP

Finally, a seamless sweeps for a trip to the World Cup. No essay, no quiz, just click and enter. Folks can register here and enter once a day - or more if you tell a friend, and even more if you’re a T-Mobile customer, which I am not and which I do not intend to be as I have no intentions of owning a cell phone anytime soon. But if you are a T-Mobile customer with a hankering to get to the World Cup, check out the “insider” options.

This sweeps includes five (!) trips to the World Cup this summer. The Grand Prize is 3 nights in Berlin for the Final Match, with airfare, on July 6. The remaining first- through fourth-place prizes are two nights and airfare for, in order of desirability, the semi-final match in Munich on July 5, then earlier matches, like Japan versus Brazil on June 22 in Dortmund.

I’m bookmarking this one and entering daily.

I’ll post the deadline and a link to the Official Rules later in the day. I’m having trouble accessing the fine print right now.

P.S. I’ve been meaning to comment on several sweeps issues. One, I have not, repeat not, noticed an upswing in spam since I started entering all these travel sweeps. Any promotional emails I’ve gotten, and there have only been a few, have usually come after notice at the time of entry. So, no surprises. That’s reassuring. Separately, I am not thrilled that so many sweeps ask entrants for their date of birth at the time of entry, since they are one of the key pieces of data marauding identity thieves like to collect. I think sweeps sponsors do this for legitimate identification purposes, but wonder if it’s misguided. I think entry forms should ask only for an entrant’s year of birth as opposed to the precise date of birth. That’s what the folks at Luxury Link do.