LOCKERZ is a SCAM

Well, redemption has come and gone. By now, it’s really no surprise how it happened. No special details to talk about this time so let’s just cut to the chase.

———————————————————————————————————————————————–

General Redemption:
Day: May 26, 2010
Time: 4:58 PM EDT (GMT -5:00)

The short and sweet of it is this, 1 minute redemption. Want more detail? This was the same as April’s redemption, and the one before that. Just go read those. Here and Here

The problem that arose in March has come back to show it’s ugly head. Time of redemption was 4:58 PM in Eastern time. For the Pacific fans, they saw it at 1:58 PM. Congrats Lockerz, you’re fanbase is made up of teens in HIGH SCHOOL!!!! THEY DON’T GET OUT UNTIL 3:00!!!!

———————————————————————————————————————————————–
I’ve gotten a few people commenting about the time thing from the March redemption and saying I was stupid because obviously 1 redemption cannot satisfy the world. NO SHIT SHERLOCK! That’s why I had to explain to them 3 or so times that I even wrote suggestions to allow Lockerz to serve their fanbase better.

Since ONE (1) redemption cannot satisfy the world, why not make several? Split the prize amounts evenly across all the redemptions so that gives everyone a better chance at redeeming. Then, why not make each redemption in a timezone allowing for a 4 hour difference? That way when it is 5 in Pacific time, it is 8. When it is 6 in England, it will be 9 for a place 3 hours different from them. Thereby allowing the WORLD to be satisfied by a more localized redemption. That way, each area will not have issues like school. It only takes good scheduling and a little research into possible issues like when does school end for people. But if the research is done and redemptions were localized, everyone would atleast be able to attend a redemption. For people who are thinking, “What if people from outside my timezone pops into my redemption?”. Lockerz can block you out by IP. It just requires a little bit of programming knowledge.
———————————————————————————————————————————————–
Here are FaceBook comments you’ll never see anymore because Lockerz censors every criticism and negative comment directed towards them. It’s even better this time because they took down questions that were directed towards their system and why it is the way it is. Mainly, why do they continue to fail everytime and not improve. (Names are partially censored to protect authors.)

———————————————————————————————————————————————–
S***h*n Tr*mbl**:
I think this is a big scam. I have been a member for almost or over a year and have not gotten a thing that I was promised. And now they have opened up a new thing called SHOP. That way they can sell you the free stuff they promised instead. Everytime I email them they just tell me that they are still developing the site and by the end of this year… See More the prize mall will be stocked 24/7. If they would stop spending the money they are getting from all of the ads that we are viewing on the concerts and everything else they are doing then they could give us some prizes. I have already given up wasting my day on waiting on a redemtion that alway lasts less than 30 minutes. My over 1000 points will just have to sit there until they finally give us what we are using the site for. Is there anyone that joined for something other than the free stuff? I think not.

———————————————————————————————————————————————–
J**n G*t***re*
That’s bull I was in middle of class when it started…they should change the time it starts

———————————————————————————————————————————————–
A**er M***er
I got to the redemption exactly 1 MINUTE after they made the announcement on the site and already 3/4 of everything was gone.:/

———————————————————————————————————————————————–

S** A**ms
I got something over a month ago on a redemption and it still has not come! BIG SCAM.

———————————————————————————————————————————————–

A**m R**m**
already?! man that sucks. everytime i tried to redeem something it said MORE SOON.

———————————————————————————————————————————————–

Bo**rt **u
I was in the middle of sixth period when it happened. This wasn’t a general redemption, it was an East Coast redemption.

———————————————————————————————————————————————–

B*a**y St****s C****ran
to everyone that is still using lockers i did as well for a long time and not once did i make redemption it always made it seem like i was just a min to late. this is why i will no longer use lockers they are just a bunch of hot air f@ck them

———————————————————————————————————————————————–

Gre**ry Jo***on
WAT?! The redemption never even happened! I was waiting cheking every 10 minutes and it always said more soon. Rip off

———————————————————————————————————————————————–

Kim** B*e**on
once again.you click redeem and it’s all ‘sold out.’
….I’ve worked so hard for my points. But now, it’s like… what’s the point? :/

———————————————————————————————————————————————–

Ma***e* G****o***ster Ti**g*on
Excuses excuses..fucking tired of waiting. Shit blows, done with this mother fucking site.

———————————————————————————————————————————————–

C*r**z Ma**i*
Hm, Lockerz services suck badly. Like really, they are horrible. I have sent them so many e-mails and messages from contact us, because they accused me of cheating for no reason after my +7 months on this site. It is sad. I can’t get my points back because they won’t give an appropriate response. These stupid robot responses. They need to fix this problem at once, otherwise, lockerz is just a scam for THEIR lying and blaming.

———————————————————————————————————————————————–

J*n M**u*i*
Hey guys, you know what’s funny ? If u would work all that time you spent watching videos, you could simply buy an ipod ;>

———————————————————————————————————————————————–

An*** Le**
lol, I was able to get in 37 minutes after it started. Only thing left was paypal money and wallpapers. First one I was able to witness, and there was a major lack of cool stuff anyways. I was very disappointed.
————————————————— (My Personal Favourite) ——————————————————–
M*** *a****t
You guys, just be patient lockerz is still growing And needs time. So you might as well just stop it is a scam they only put a small amount of stuff in stock so they can attract member but not enough prizes so everyone gets one

-LAB
——————————————— (From a very inquisitive user) ——————————————————
S**n B***e
@kristians can u give real answers other than what is already the obvious? such as is lockerz a scam? What amount of items does lockerz put out? Why does it take more than 8 month for a lockez z list shirt to get shipped?

Does lockerz make money on all our video viewings? if so why cant lockerz get more stuff to redeem? why are the redeem points going up and points per vids stay the same? the macs are way too much.
——————————————— (Answer from LAB member) ———————————————————
@S**n – 1.Lockerz is not a scam

2. We are not provided with that information … See More

3. Cause there are hundred of thousands people who made the z-list.

4. Don’t know if they make money off our views.

LAB’s are here to help with your questions about Lockerz/issues not here to discuss Lockerz finances, etc.

-LAB
———————————————————————————————————————————————–
I’m completely dissatisfied from the LAB’s answer. Sounds so generic that it makes computers look like they have emotions. Therefore, I decided I’d answer him myself. Of course this never went up on FaceBook because it would never survive. This is the short version. The long read about how Lockerz is a scam is the one after.
———————————————————————
1. Lockerz is a scam. They gained members off of untruthful descriptions written on their site and continued false promises. They continually change and edit information without notification to members. By gaining members, they make money because of advertisement views and selling Dailies to marketing companies. To profit off of deceit defines SCAM.

2. They say thousands which makes sense. A few thousand prizes for hundreds of thousands to potentially millions of users. Hmm, maybe the ratio doesn’t work? They also say thousands of prizes. That could mean thousands of T-shirts and 5 iPods. They never specified which items they have thousands of so they can say they have thousands of prizes in total but only 10 of each game, 2 iPods each 1 iMac and the Mac Air is just for show. Just because it’s listed at PTZ Place doesn’t mean they have to have it in stock.

3. Because Lockerz is completely crap at organizing themselves. They also can’t afford to keep up the $2 shirts.

4. It’s obvious they do. Why do people have advertisements? Because the company pays the site money for people to see the advertisement. Before a video starts, a 30 sec. dish-washing soap advertisement plays. For every thousand or ten thousand plays, Lockerz gets paid. Therefore, the more videos we watch, the more Lockerz makes. For Dailies, they sell your opinions to marketing companies. Take the Speedo daily for example. They take a poll to see how many people say Speedo’s are in and how many say out. Thereby allowing companies to produce more or less Speedo’s and advertise to the population of the world or more likely, North America.

———————————————————————————————————————————————–
As promised, here is my case on why Lockerz is a scam. Skip if the text wall scares you. Every line represents a new paragraph.
———————————————————————
Firstly, why is the word scam used? Scam is defined as profit from deceit; a deceitful or fraudulent act. Lockerz profits off of the users by advertisement views, profit margins from SHOP, and selling your opinions from Dailies to companies and marketing groups. By watching the advertisement prior to a Lockerz video, the advertisement company logs the watch and for every thousand or ten thousand views, Lockerz gets paid. By selling items like a PS3 from SHOP, Lockerz makes a profit because they do NOT pay $300 to SONY for the PS3 to resell. They make a profit off you just like normal stores like Best Buy or Walmart. The Dailies are sold to companies, most likely in bulk, to get an idea what will be the new fashion, what is Hot and Not, so they know how to market directly to teens. The teenage population is huge at this point and if advertisement companies know what items to promote, the larger the profits will be for the company they represent. We do the dailies, we watch the videos and Lockerz gets the payment. This covers the profit part of the definition. Deception comes next.
———————————————————————
When you first joined, you most likely heard or read about Lockerz’s easy redemption and they used the phrase “turn around and redeem your PTZ for incredible merchandise, unique experiences and exclusive deals and sales” to hook you into joining. Never did it mention anything about what a redemption was, how it was only monthly, and how you had a near 0% chance of redeeming a prize. Lockerz made themselves sound like a company that had a redemption system similar to the way SHOP works now. The majority of users on Lockerz thought it was just simply point and click on the prize you wanted and could be done at your leisure. No one was expecting to be forced into competition against every Lockerz user just to get a CHANCE at a prize. Lockerz made themselves out to be an easy redeeming site where things could be easily yours at a chance of 100%. It’s not until you join and spend 2 or 4 weeks where you learn how awful redemptions are and how your chances dropped from 100% to near 0%. However, in the span of the 2 or 4 weeks, chances are all the videos have been watched and dailies been answered. Since your chance of getting a prize is already exponentially low, they don’t have to worry about losing money because there’s a good chance you already quit by the time you endured 2 redemptions. They already profited off you so now they could care less. Thereby profit from deceit. Furthermore, PTZ expire 1 year after they are issued on a monthly basis. It’s very likely that unless you cave and buy from SHOP, your PTZ will disappear before you redeem. Also notice how no other site that offers prizes for doing services has expirations. Lockerz is the only site that has expiry dates on earned site currency.
———————————————————————
Going on about how they could care less about you, try sending e-mails to customer service. 3 of them came back as generic computer generated e-mails and 2 went unanswered. I e-mailed Kathy questions on Lockerz’s work ethic and views on users and I have not gotten a response. I resent it twice and still nothing. I think she blocked me. There are many cases so far about how people are getting shafted at Lockerz. Many people are saying they were accused of cheating when they bought from SHOP or their SHOP bought item went Out Of Stock so they will get refunds on both PTZ and money. So far, I have no reports on any refunds, all still pending.
———————————————————————
Continuing on about cheating, if you read the Terms Of Service, they can deem any suspicious behaviour as cheating. They do not need any hard evidence about it. If they even suspect you have done anything wrong, regardless of it’s true or not, you can get your prize revoked and punished. Basically, Lockerz can say everyone at this redemption cheated and everyone loses their PTZ and their prize. They make the rules and they can do anything they want.
———————————————————————
When they do redemptions, very few people redeem. Otherwise redemptions would last longer than 1 minute. Starting from March of 2010, they declined in the amount of users, from an average of 600,000 to 370,000. Lockerz is losing its members due to poor business habits and terrible customer (user) relations. In fact, the Better Business Bureau (BBB), gave Lockerz an F. For those that do not know, BBB is an organization that rates the customer-business relations and every large chain company is listed. Anyone who does well by the BBB is generally a company that takes care of customer problems and listens. Now back to losing members. Lockerz has effectively lost over 200,000 active users yet they still have 1 minute redemptions. Anyone see the problem? You have fewer members than before yet all prizes are still gone at the same rate? That just means that there were far less prizes than we expected. If you decrease one variable and the result is the same, that means that either
1. You have not reached the equilibrium point where prizes last longer than 5 minutes.
2. Lockerz is decreasing the amounts of prizes as they lose members.
3. Lockerz has less than the expected thousands of prizes we were all led to believe.
———————————————————————
Even after they redeem, people must pray they don’t get the infamous “We Sold Out” e-mail where they say, “Yea you were fast, but you still weren’t fast enough so we sold out before you finished. You got the confirmation but now we revoke it from you. Have a nice day.” That is complimentary to their cheater rule and is justified by their Terms of Service. The fact that they can even do this, even if they are legally covered, shows poor business relations.
———————————————————————
A Z-list shirt? Wow congrats for falling for a marketing ploy. By them sending you a shirt, you will now go parading around in it and saying “Lockerz is legit. I got a shirt.” They could be completely a scam and people would fall for it now that there are people going around saying “No, it’s completely real because I got a shirt”. Not only does it prove a false legitimacy, it is an advertising ploy because now people who never would have joined or heard about Lockerz would now join because of you, allowing Lockerz to gain more profits. They even removed the Z-list shirt now because they probably do not want to set up a budget to allow Lockerz members to get more $2 shirts. They already peaked back in ’09 so they have no need to promote Lockerz further. Most people who wanted to join already have and those who refuse to will not change their minds after all this negative criticism. They’re now being cheaper by not even offering a tangible item. From what I hear, Z-listers get an E-Survival Pack with a Lockerz Desktop. Just what we wanted, an ugly purple background.
———————————————————————
There are arguments that Lockerz is still in beta and how it will get better. Newsflash guys. Lockerz has been up for 1 year and 3 months now. Every month since the launch of PLAY, they have been seeing profits from your video views. You’d think that since now videos are helping fund Lockerz, that the prize budgets would increase and that redemption time would last longer. Well, obviously it hasn’t otherwise redemptions would last longer than a minute. Prizes that were less top tier like NDS or WII games would last longer than 1 minute. For 15 straight months, they have NOT had a redemption where top prizes have lasted longer than the normal 1 minute. I know that Lockerz was nice back in the first month or two before they went mass public advertising. I heard of many good things back then. Since it gained popularity, the prize ratio seemed to slip into 1:1000000. It’s clear that Lockerz cannot give away prizes as much as they promised and that’s why we are seeing so many people getting their prizes revoked even after a successful redemption.
———————————————————————
Finally, I’m hitting Lockerz’s FaceBook. Notice how your negative posts get deleted? Lockerz censors constructive criticisms, complaints, and any negative feedback in general. The Labs end up answering air because of all the deletion that goes on. To liken this to real life, it’s similar to Communism or the Black Oppression except with less violence. In American history, the government (White Man) would oppress the slaves (Black Man) and refuse free speech, although it was against the first amendment. Lockerz does the same. They allow you to post but short of 3 minutes, your post will be gone and you will be banned. Zgore has posted several times, some offensive, many not, and each of them were taken down and he was banned on every account made. Lockerz works like a communist party without governmental power.
———————————————————————
So most of you might be thinking, “Hey quit whining, it’s free!”
I complain that Lockerz redemption sucks. If they make money off me, I think I have a damn right to come out and complain and say “Hey, why do you see profits while I do services on your site and see no tangible results of my own? Why am I forced to go in competition on a blind date to even get a shot at seeing the results of my labour?” Granted getting PTZ is like getting dust in an unclean room, it just piles and piles. The point is, we have these stacks of PTZ and nothing to spend it on. I have enough for 99% of the stuff in PTZ Place and yet I can’t even get a single game on SHOP? Lockerz continues to see profits that if invested properly, could possibly fix PTZ Place itself and allow for a smooth redemption yet after 1 year and 3 months, we are still seeing 1 minute redemptions. It is quite obvious at this point that they don’t try to fix these when they can make you buy their overpriced crap at SHOP, especially since PTZ expirations are coming up.
———————————————————————
Another thing I hear a lot is “STFU IDIOTS!!! MY FRIEND/PERSON ON YOUTUBE/I GOT A PRIZE FROM LOCKERZ!!!! IT’S NOT A SCAM!”
I never said that they don’t give prizes. They do but the question is how many? Lockerz has advertised themselves as a 100% chance redeem site but through experience, every user can undeniably say that it is not true. They do give out prizes. The catch is, the amount of prizes is nowhere near suitable for the amount of active users on the site. Youtube has say 350 or so un-boxing videos and another 22,000 invite videos. The amount of un-boxing videos might not be a large chunk of the population of people who got prizes but Lockerz has been open for a year and 3 months now. You’d expect the number to exceed 1000 if they truly did give away as many prizes as they lead on. People who scream out so-and-so got a prize does not help the situation. Lockerz does not give out more prizes than they need to. If they needed a minimum of 100 prizes to be given out to keep up hype, they’d do so. If it were 1 prize, they’d only give out 1 prize. By you guys spreading person X got a prize, you are spreading around the message that Lockerz is easy where it clearly is not. Redemptions aren’t done to satisfy you. They are done to keep you believing that you will get a prize. They are done to keep up word-of-mouth advertising. There is no better publicity than positive reviews from a friend. If a friend vouches for Lockerz, the person is more likely to join and therefore Lockerz earns more profits while being able to NOT increase prize totals. Lockerz will continue to be a scam until they have made their system work like they had sold it to us: An easy to earn and redeem site.
———————————————————————
For all of you who seem to think I or any other writers on the site get a financial gain, think again. There are no advertisements on this site, except the ones built into WordPress which are impossible to remove. Since 2010 started, no one has attempted to recruit other sites or defer you guys to a site that might be in our best interest. I have yet to see any recent articles with a referal link. We don’t make any proits nor do we try to get you off Lockerz so there will be less people. Lockerz is already doing a good job at losing users. I’m simply here to lay down what Lockerz is, what Lockerz has done, and what Lockerz doesn’t want you to know. The site offers a rebellious voice against the opressing Lockerz company and allows new members or soon-to-be new members to know what they are getting into. This site is simply a forum where people can find out what Lockerz does to its users and allows you the opportunity to speak your mind.