FDIC insured savings account plus lottery (USA only)

[pmbug]

I've been monitoring a discussion on another forum about this for roughly four months now. It's a legit thing. I recently signed up for an account and am now sufficiently confident in it to mention it here.

It's an FDIC insured online savings account that gives you lottery tickets every week based upon how much you have on deposit (1 ticket for every $25 deposited). Lottery winnings can range from $0.10 to $10million. The annual percentage yield including guaranteed interest plus average expected lottery winnings seems to run around 1.4% right now. Not too bad for a no risk, liquid cash position.

They have an affiliate program so opening an account with the following link gets you and I both 100 free prize tickets for a week:

Yotta - A chance to win every day

Play free games on Yotta, climb to the top of the leaderboard, win tokens and tickets to redeem for life-changing prizes.

withyotta.page.link

Feel free to join on your own without an affiliate link.

 

[Chigg]

I wonder if you lived in a state that does not have a lottery or allow online gaming would be eligible to open an account.

 

[pmbug]

I'm not sure that there is any legal issue. It's an FDIC insured savings account.

Maybe an issue if you struck lightning and won a grand prize, but otherwise small winnings are direct deposited like bank interest.

I'm not a lawyer and the above isn't legal advice.

Yotta FAQ page doesn't address your issue specifically, but indicates that anyone in the USA can open an account.

 

[pmbug]

Just read the official rules and legally its a no purchase necessary sweepstakes. Not a lottery.

Official Rules - Yotta

With Yotta, you save money and unlock the chance to win prizes up to $10m every week. The best part is you can’t lose. Even if you don’t win a prize, your money still grows over 2x faster than the national average. It’s a win-win.

www.withyotta.com

 

[pmbug]

I won a total of $0.35 on 3 out of 204 tickets. A family member I referred won $0.20 on 2 out of 24 tickets (hitting 2 out of 24 tickets is pretty lucky). We both created our accounts after Monday, so our tickets missed opportunities for some of the drawing numbers.

It looks like the vast majority of tickets win only if you hit the Sunday number draw. Numbers range from 1 to 70, so it's a low chance. I would expect to average one winning ticket every week per every 70 (randomly picked) tickets owned.

 

[pmbug]

So our family pool has several hundred tickets currently. Before last night's draw, the pool results for the week were looking pretty sad. We only had one ticket that had 3 matches. However, last night's number also matched that ticket, so we now have our first 4 match ticket ($10 reward). If it manages to hit tonight's number (1/70 chance), it will share a $1,000 reward with other winners Yotta wide (estimated at $30 reward).

 

[pmbug]

Yotta changed their ticket allotment schema (via email):

*Yotta Update*

Thank you for being a Yotta user! We are announcing a change to Yotta's ticket system.
Beginning May 3rd, you will earn 1 ticket for every $150 on your balance above $10,000. You will still earn 1 ticket per $25 on the first $10,000 in your account.
For example, if you have $11,000 in deposits, the first $10,000 will earn 400 tickets and the remaining $1,000 will earn an addiitonal 6 tickets for a total of 406 tickets.
*Why is it changing?*
Our ticket rates are tied to macroeconomic factors such as short term interest rates, which are at record lows.
We are making this change to maintain the size of our prizes in this environment.
...

 

[pmbug]

* necro bump *

I forgot about this thread. I never posted any follow up updates, but my family and I pulled all our money out of Yotta long before it went bankrupt. I got spooked when I noticed that they were changing the reward structure of the draw haphazardly/fequently. It didn't smell right to me.

Background (June 1, 2024):

When Adam Moelis co-founded a fintech startup named Yotta in 2019, he wanted to give Americans a new way to save money to help them cushion the ups and downs of life.

Instead, his company has inadvertently been a source of deep pain for thousands of customers who relied on Yotta accounts to receive paychecks, pay bills and save for emergencies.

The crisis began May 11, when a dispute between two of Yotta's banking partners — fintech middleman Synapse and Tennessee-based Evolve Bank & Trust — led to the lockup of accounts at Yotta and at least two dozen other startups. Synapse declared bankruptcy earlier this year after several key clients abandoned the firm amid disagreements over the tracking of customer funds.

For the past three weeks, 85,000 Yotta customers with a combined $112 million in savings have been locked out of their accounts, Moelis told CNBC. The disruption had upended lives, forced users to borrow money for food and thrown upcoming events like surgeries or weddings into doubt, he said.
...

More:

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/01/synapse-bankruptcy-yotta-accounts-locked.html

Today:

A federal judge dismissed Yotta Technologies’ lawsuit alleging its former banking partner, Evolve Bank & Trust, had stolen and misappropriated millions of dollars in customer funds.

Yotta alleged in September that Evolve had “utterly failed in its most basic duty to its customers,” many of whom lost access to – some temporarily, some still – a cumulative $100 million-plus.

But Judge Trina Thompson of the District Court of Northern California dismissed Yotta’s lawsuit against Evolve on May 15, writing that the fintech “did not sufficiently plead the ‘who, what, when, where, and how’” of the alleged mismanagement by Evolve and its middleware partner Synapse, which filed for bankruptcy in April 2024.

Thompson ordered Yotta to provide more details in an amended complaint by June 2.
...
Yotta intends to file an amended complaint by the deadline and “remain(s) committed to pursuing this case," Yotta CEO Adam Moelis told Banking Dive.
...
Evolve filed its motion to dismiss the lawsuit in December, alleging that Yotta’s lawsuit treats Synapse and Evolve as the same entity, without specifying what each party did. Synapse is “a non-party who is immune from suit given it is in bankruptcy proceedings,” Evolve noted.
...

Evolve dodges Yotta lawsuit for now

Yotta’s lawsuit against its former bank partner was dismissed for failing to “plead the ‘who, what, when, where, and how’” of Evolve’s alleged misdoings. Yotta must file an amended complaint by June 2.

www.bankingdive.com