They Won Millions for Life. Until They Didn't.

Have you ever wanted to get a giant check delivered to your door?

For decades, Americans across the country have wished for exactly that.

And thousands have had it come true.

The check would be delivered by a TV host wearing an orange tie.

We're headed up to the house.

I don't see any cars in the driveway.

See if she's home.

Hopefully she is.

He'd approach the winner's front door carrying balloons, flowers, and followed by an entourage of TV cameras.

When they answered the door, he'd give them the good news.

How's your day going so far?

It's about to get a whole lot better.

It is about to get a whole lot better because guess what?

You just won $10,000 for coming cheering us.

No way.

And then the host would hand the winner their ginormous check.

What do you think of that?

Holy moly!

Are you serious?

I'm dead serious.

The company behind these sweepstakes is Publishers Clearinghouse.

Over the course of decades, they've given away hundreds of millions of dollars to thousands of Americans, giant checks and all, making their dream of winning big a reality.

But earlier this year, Publishers Clearinghouse went under.

Well, it's the end of the line for Publishers Clearinghouse.

The decades-old sweepstakes company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

And for a handful of winners, that dream of making millions went up in smoke.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Jessica Mendoza.

It's Tuesday, October 7th.

Coming up on the show: the publisher's clearinghouse winners losing out after its bankruptcy.

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Before it became known for its sweepstakes, Publishers Clearinghouse, or PCH, got its start selling magazine subscriptions.

The company was founded on Long Island in the 50s,

and it's meant to be for the coupleing of magazine publishers.

That's our colleague Akiko Matsuda.

She covers bankruptcy.

They sell magazine subscriptions on behalf of publishers.

That's why it's called Publishers Clearing House.

In those early days, PCH would send out lists of magazines through the mail to homes across the country with the hope that recipients would subscribe and earn PCH a commission.

Those mailers were a core part of PCH's business.

They came in thick yellow envelopes.

And by the 80s, the company was selling more than just magazine subscriptions.

Things like jewelry, collectible coins, ceramic figurines, you name it, all through the mail.

But there was a problem with those mailers.

PCH sent out a lot of them.

And for a lot of Americans, it was just junk mail.

PCH became the butt of jokes on shows like Seinfeld.

Because the mail never stops.

It just keeps coming and coming and coming.

There's never a let up.

It's relentless.

Every day it piles up more and more and more.

And you've got to to get it out.

But the more you get out, the more it keeps coming in.

And then the bar code radar breaks and it publishes clearing out.

All right, all right, all right.

So, how do you entice people to open their junk mail?

The answer was sweepstakes.

They included as a marketing tool to get people excited about going through those lists

because they have the sweepstake application too.

And some people may try to buy magazine, but at the same time, many people try to just apply for the sweepstakes.

What's the new Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes doing over there?

Cluttering my desks.

Don't you know you could win $2 million?

Stop making excuses.

Enter the one and only Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes.

There's no place like our house.

Come on, send it in.

The strategy worked.

With prize money in play, more recipients responded to the mailers.

And as more people responded, PCH would sell more magazines and merchandise.

Eventually, PCH started featuring winners in its TV ads through what the company called the Prize Patrol.

Those are the commercials where hosts travel the country giving out oversized checks to winners.

The Publisher's Clearinghouse Prize Patrol kicks off the 21st century with $21 million.

It'll all happen live on TV and FPGA.

Many people who I talked to said that, you know, haven't you seen those commercials popping in during the football, Super Bowl, and kind of, wow,

10,000, 1 million.

Right, right.

That's the stuff that like I remember about sweepsticks.

It's like, oh my gosh, there's confetti and then the giant, like, yeah, the giant check.

Yeah.

And you don't know what's going on, but it's a happy moment.

What were some of the prizes?

What was the range of what they would give away?

5,000, 10,000, and can be 200,000.

And the biggest one is $5,000 a week, forever, forever, quote unquote, meaning that the winner is going to get the prize for life.

And after the winner passes away,

it's going to be passed along to somebody designated person until the person dies.

Wow, two lifetimes.

Two lifetime.

PCH's Forever Prize was the biggest the company gave out.

promising contestants a constant stream of checks for life.

February 28th and the Prize Patrol is in Cottage Grove, Oregon, and we're about to surprise Tamar Veach with $5,000 a week forever.

Let's go do it, Howie.

Woo!

We all pretty much all had just gotten up from bed.

And so when the phone, or when the doorbell started ringing, like, you know, it was like,

you know, not just a one ding.

And so we're all like, what on earth?

That's Tamar Veach.

She won PCH's Forever Prize in early 2021.

She lives in Oregon with her husband, Matthew, and their three kids.

And so Matt goes to the door and he looks out because we have a window to the left of our door.

And he's like, honey, there's people with balloons and cameras.

No, I said, honey, it's for you.

Oh,

well, that's what it was.

I had thought you had said that.

And so I was just like, wait, what?

And you could see them.

And they were standing out there with balloons and cameras and lights.

First thing I said was, I look terrible.

I just got up.

Oh, my gosh.

Why did they have to come down?

So, of course, I just went out there and I brought my daughter with us.

I was just, oh my goodness.

Hi.

Are you looking for Tamar?

Yeah.

Come on out.

Tamar.

Do you know what's going on right now?

Yeah, I do.

I didn't think it would ever happen, though.

Oh, today's the day.

Today's a good one.

You just won the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweetsteaks.

$5,000 a week forever.

I didn't think this would ever happen.

Could you guys use the money?

We do okay, but still.

Oh my goodness.

this is truly real don't give up

how did you feel when you found out like when you looked out the window or maybe when you opened the door like how did it feel to know for sure that shoot you finally won after all that time you know i'm not like one of those people that you know jumps around and screams that's just not me but when i went out there i was just kind of i was just standing there just kind of wide-eyed like oh my goodness you know yeah it happened

it was for me it was a huge relief

Tamar and Matthew met in the army in 2001 while they were stationed in Germany.

They married soon after.

The army doesn't care if you're dating or even if you're engaged.

You have to be married.

And so we both, on our own, we both kind of thought, oh, we have this sneaky idea.

What if, what if we got married?

And he actually was not supposed to be in Germany at all.

He was supposed to have gone to Italy.

And we joke because we're like, okay, well, he was obviously sent there to meet me.

Because otherwise.

That was it.

That was the mission.

Both Tamar and Matthew served in the Army during the Iraq War.

And through their service, they develop disabilities that prevent them from working full-time jobs.

Tamar has chronic pain problems, and Matthew has struggled with PTSD.

Since leaving the Army, they've depended on disability payments from the Army to live.

They say it's enough to get by, but money's still tight.

I'm working on budgeting food to have good, healthy meals for our family.

And boy, we spend a chunk of change on just on good food we're not even eating extravagantly but it's like every time it's shocking to me food and clothes and yeah children keep growing

immediately after winning that lifetime prize tamar got a check for fifty thousand dollars pch told them the rest of her winnings would come later so what did you do with the money with the first that first payment We paid off debt.

Right.

That was like the first thing.

Wow.

Yeah.

And it's a talk about

an immense relief

to just zero every bit of debt you have.

We had a minivan that was falling apart.

And so we were able to get a new car that all of us could fit in.

And that's nice.

You know, I mean, it's basically, you know, we took care of all of our needs, all the things that needed to happen, you know, fixing things around the house, you know, basically just everything that we needed.

After that initial check, Tamar got her winnings in a lump sum every February.

After taxes, the total came out to about $200,000 a year.

Did you feel certain that the checks would keep coming?

Yeah, we asked Publishers Clearinghouse, the lady that we interfaced with, and she said, oh yeah,

we have

all these millions and millions of dollars to pay all the prizes.

But it was this real reassurance that, yeah, yeah, yeah, that we'll be able to pay this and we plan on paying, giving more of these away.

But that forever prize didn't exactly last forever.

That's next.

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Since winning PCH's Forever Prize, Tamar and Matthew have used their prize money in a number of ways.

They bought a car, paid off their debt, and they've taken their children on vacations.

Earlier this year, they were expecting their usual $200,000 deposit in February, and they'd started making plans for how they'd spend it.

We had gotten four years of payments, which is

a good chunk of money, and we spent a lot of it.

We set some aside for it.

We started to talk about saving for college fund for our kids.

We did have a rainy day fund.

But we had planned on kind of like, okay, we'd gone some big trips.

We're going to get paid this year.

This is our plan for the money.

We've got a couple of big repairs we need to do on our house, but we're going to really start saving a lot of this money right but the payment didn't come something was up three weeks in we started we emailed basically everyone at publishers clearing house we could and finally got a response from one of their lawyers and he was like oh we've changed the system we're not going to pay you yearly we're going to pay you quarterly in july now

okay and we're like okay well And I sent emails back and forth of like, you're putting us at real hardship here.

We planned for this.

It turns out that for years, PCH's business had been struggling.

The company had been trying to transition its business online, away from the mailers it had become known for.

But PCH faced a lot more competition in the world of e-commerce.

Here's our colleague Akiko Matsuda again.

So they kind of thought that those online businesses, you know, became very prevalent.

If you go to Amazon, you can buy anything, everything.

At the same time, PCH's costs were going up, everything from the price of TV ads to its mailers.

The cost of those, you know, shipping postages for sending direct mailing to customers also went up.

So it's a combination of the things that they are trying to change into digital company.

Magazines, subscriptions are not selling anymore.

merchandise that they have to kind of stop selling those things because it's not selling, it's not making any money for the company.

So many things didn't work out.

But the biggest hit to PCH's business came in 2023.

The Federal Trade Commission had accused PCH of misleading customers into thinking that buying merchandise from the company would better their chances of winning the sweepstakes.

They somehow gave the impression that if you buy it, by subscribe to magazine, or if you buy these products, you're going to win prizes.

What did PCH have to say about that?

Were they like telling customers that if they bought stuff, they would have a better chance?

They denied any accusation, but they decided to settle for $18 million.

And they said that that was a very difficult amount of money for them to pay.

That $18 million settlement was a huge blow to PCH's finances.

And in April of this year, the company filed for bankruptcy.

The day after the filing, winners like Tamar got an email from PCH.

It said that the company intended to keep sending the checks.

Tamar and Matthew decided to wait for the promised July payment.

But July came and went, and no payments showed up in Tamar's account.

When they asked the company, PCH referred them to the bankruptcy case.

Tamar and Matthew would have to claim their winnings there.

But Akiko says it's unlikely Tamar and Matthew will be paid from the bankruptcy.

Because in the bankruptcy case, prize winners are not secured creditors.

What is a secured creditor?

So secured, everybody knows or maybe many people knows about how mortgages work.

When you buy a house, you take out a mortgage.

That's secured loan.

That's because if you cannot make payments for mortgage loans, the bank will eventually come to your house and foreclose your property and they take it.

In other words, the mortgage is backed up by an underlying asset, the house.

In bankruptcy, the same principle applies.

Secured creditors have assets they can claim back from the bankruptcy estate.

But in the PCH bankruptcy, prize winners like Tamar don't have an asset to back up their claims to their winnings.

They just have a contract.

But so what happens in that case?

The bankruptcy empowers those filers to reject contracts.

So this is very unfortunate, but that's why if you are not secured creditors, secured meaning that they have some asset to back up those contracts or loans,

this is just

agreement between the two parties.

So that can be rejected.

That's the whole point of bankruptcy, to give the filers a second chance so that they can get out of bankruptcy and thrive as a new revive business.

This summer, PCH was bought out of bankruptcy by an online casino company called ARB Interactive for over $7 million.

ARB says it plans to keep doing PCH sweepstakes, but it isn't responsible for paying past winners.

ARB says that it understands the concerns surrounding unpaid prizes owed to past winners.

It added that it's taking steps to ensure that all future prizes are protected, regardless of the company's financial status.

What are your options as of now?

So, right now, for us,

we're in the pool of unsecured debt in the bankruptcy and probably will get pennies on the dollar.

I've joked with friends that we're going to get a check for a couple hundred dollars and a handwritten note, and that'll be it.

Tamar and Matthew say that they'll be okay financially.

They still get disability payments from the Army to cover their expenses.

Still, the loss of their prize is a huge blow to their family.

They'd plan to use the prize money to pay for their kids' college expenses.

But Tamar and Matthew say that what upsets them the most was the way PCH treated them.

It was the deception that made it the worst because it's like you, you guys kept telling us that, yes, you know, we're your priority.

Yes, we have the money to

last for such and such.

And so it was just kind of like, why would you lie?

You should, you could have just told us to begin with, and now you've made it worse.

And not just for us, for all the other lifetime winners.

You know, I played this game by their rules.

And then it was like, I won because I did this.

I won because what you set out, I did, and it came back, you know.

And so it was just kind of like, it's the trust, yeah, and the deception is the hardest because it's like, it didn't really need to happen that way.

That's all for today, Tuesday, October 7th.

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