I Watched the Fiveish Telethon So You Don't Have To

This is a jump off from my previous post about Oorah. Every year, Oorah hosts a charity “auction” that is really a raffle. It is almost comically corrupt in terms of the prizes offered to the point that it is basically just gambling. This is my summary of the 3+ hours of the 2023 auction that I watched.

I’ve been to a couple charity auctions myself. My memories consist of watching people bid on gift baskets, memorabilia, or even gift cards to sums of maybe $300 at the most. They were social events, either for a public school or a local non-profit, where donors came to mingle. Oorah also does charity auctions, but the way they organize this events is in another galaxy compared to mine and many other’s experience. I’m going to just cover the auction and telethon for now.

The online auction is both the easiest and hardest to explain. So it’s not unheard of to pick up an item at a charity auction for below market rate, that’s sometimes the incentive. For example: you buy a rare baseball card that got donated to a charity auction, there’s some upsides that the benefitting institution in terms of taxes and ease of processing. Oorah does something different.

The Oorah ‘auctions’ themselves don’t work like auctions at all. They’re basically sweepstakes or a raffle where donors buy tickets that are randomly drawn. The other main difference is in the prizes. Where others have donated items with a somewhat subjective market price, Oorah charity auctions seem to primarily have a different kind of prize: cash. Not collectible buffalo nickels, not a $2 bill signed by Richard Nixon, large sums of money that Oorah gives to winners with little or no strings attached.

Of 49* potential prizes, 15 are just money. That doesn’t include some of the other prizes, many of which are one step removed from being a transfer of money. Here is a list of the auction items you can win for as little as $5 that are just straight up, undeniably, money. In fact, one of the hosts points out that one winner spent $500 on tickets and made their money back 100 times over. Here is a short list of 15 prizes:

1. $25,000 Cash

2. $7,000 Visa Giftcard

3. Fiveish Cash ($5,555)

4. $100,000 Bonus

5. Daily Cash ($50 a day for 6 months, $9,000 total)

6. $7,000 Mastercard