T he site that allowed you to buy a raffle ticket in hopes of winning an iMac has been closed. MacRaffle.com ran regular raffles with the prize being Macs, and Mac peripherals. As with any raffle, one was asked to buy a ticket from a limited quantity of available tickets, and one of those tickets would be drawn for the prize. According to the message currently up on the MacRaffle.com Web site from site owner Corey M. Ormsby, the Ohio State Attorney General has taken exception to the idea. From the site:
I apologize for the current status of MacRaffle.com and hope that I am able to explain fully what is going on. As the creator of our MacRaffle Community it is my duty and obligation to give the facts to you in the same honest and open manner I have always communicated MacRaffle news.
On 9-24-02 at about 11:30 am I was served a search warrant by a representative of the Attorney Generals office to enter and search MacRaffle Headquarters for evidence against me in an investigation into the activities conducted on my Web site: www.MacRaffle.com
They invited themselves inside and told me that I was not under arrest or being charged with anything at this time and that they were simply going to discuss the site with me. After a while in our discussion they informed me that they had a search warrant to search through the MacRaffle records and that they were going to seize my computers and all of the MacRaffle documents. Due to this seizure of property and the current investigation I made a call and had the site closed until further notice.
It is the Ohio Attorney Generalis position that I was operating an illegal gambling operation from my home and on the Internet. This is not the case. My position is that I was operating a skill contest at my site and had given my site a feeling similar to gambling for marketing and entertainment purposes only.
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There is additional information posted at MacRaffle.com. Thanks to industry observer David Bonfiglio for his help with this article.