Did you enter the 2010 Taxslayer.com video contest? Are you SURE you entered? Because according to Taxslayer, even if you submitted videos you probably didn’t “officially” enter the contest. Based on a letter I recived yesterday from the Director of Taxslayer.com’s Growth Division, Darcel Walker, I now believe that this year’s Taxslayer video contest was a scam and that it was managed in such a way as to ensure that the contest would be voided due to lack of “official” entries so that the $20,000 in prize money would not have to be awarded. In fact, the actions of representatives of Taxslayer were so egregious they may even constitute an act of fraud.
As we explained in our May 11th post, Taxslayer.com Lies to Filmmakers, Cancels Video Contest 20 Days After Submission Deadline, the official rules of the 2010 Taxslayer.com video contest had a provision that gave them the option of “voiding” the contest if less than 25 entries were received. Though approximately 17 people submitted entries by the April 15th deadline, Taxslayer decided to exercise their cancellation option and not award any prizes. This came as a bit of a mind-blower to me since I had spent roughly 50 hours and hundreds of dollars creating 2 entries for the contest after a man named Daniel Eubanks, the head of the taxslayer contest gave me a written and signed guarantee that his contest would “definitely not” be canceled due to lack of entries. You can read the e-mails he sent to me here.
Scan of the letter I recived yesterday from Darcell Walker of taxslayer. Click to Enlarge.
A good contract lawyer would tell you that the e-mails we exchanged constitute a legally binding agreement. Mr. Eubanks knew that I would go out and make entries for the contest if there was no possibility it would be canceled and in exchange, I was promised the CHANCE to win as much as $20,000 for my efforts. But taxslayer went back on their word, canceled the contest and denied me the chance of winning that I was promised.
In the real world, you can’t just promise someone something in exchange for work and then walk away when the time came to pay up. So I did what any business person would do; I sent them a bill for my time and expenses. Taxslayer did not take this well. Mr. Eubanks, the head of the contest and Assistant director of Taxslayer’s Growth Division refused to respond to my calls, messages and e-mails. He even hung up on me the one time I got him on the phone. So I went over his head and mailed my invoice, a letter and copies of Mr. Eubank’s guarantee directly to the Director of Taxslayer’s Growth Division, Darcel Walker. Yesterday, I received a response that was so despicable and so underhanded that I don’t know how the man had the stones to send it. I’ll scan and post the entire letter but here is the most insulting part; turns out I can’t complain about the video contest because according to Mr. Walker, I never entered. Here’s a piece of what Mr. Walker had to say:
“I have recently recived your letter and invoice for production services concerning our recent taxslayer.com video contest. As you know, we canceled the contest due to lack of video submissions. In regards to your entries, you never officially entered the contest. You were required to agree and accept the official rules of the contest, sign and mail a release form and mail a high quality AVI and a Beta tape for each entry. We never received a signed release form, Beta tapes and a High Quality AVIs from you. Therefore, you never officially entered the contest and were not consider eligible for the prize money.”
Did the taxslayer rules say that I had to declare via e-mail that I accepted the rules? Yes. Did I follow that instruction? Yes. Did the taxslayer rules say that contestants must MAIL a release form, an AVI file and some Beta Tapes? Yes. Did I submit them? Of course not. Why? Well to start, the Taxslayer rules didn’t even say WHERE these materials should be mailed to. The release form didn’t have an address on it either. And the official rules provided no contact info for anyone at Taxslayer. The only e-mail address they provided was for submissions and the rules even said questions sent to that address would not be answered! So even if contestants were expected to mail in tapes and releases and AVI files, how could they if the rules didn’t say where to send them and didn’t provide a phone number or e-mail address so that they could get that information? But here is the main reason I didn’t submit a beta tape, AVI files and release forms: TAXSLAYER WAS TELLING CONTESTANTS THAT THEY SHOULD ONLY SUBMIT THOSE MATERIALS IF THEIR ENTRY WAS SELECTED FOR THE FINALS. Yes…I’m serious.
Here’s an e-mail exchange that Daniel Eubanks, head of the Taxslayer contest had with one contestant:
> Sent: Friday, April 02, 2010 1:34 PM
> To: Daniel Eubanks
> Subject: Re: Contest Entry
>
> Do I need to worry about the beta tapes, release or AVI file at this time? I saw in the official rules it said about these but during submission it didn’t, and also, I didn’t see an address on where to send them. Please advise, Thanks a lot—Shane
> On Apr 2, 2010, at 5:05 AM, Daniel Eubanks wrote:
> Shane,
>
> Our address is below, you will need to send if notified as a finalist.
> Thanks!
On March 31st, I also e-mailed Daniel Eubanks and asked if contestants needed to submit those materials. He didn’t respond to me even though we had already exchanged a few e-mails at that point. So Mr. Eubanks intentionally withheld information that apparently would have made my entries complete. I heard from other contestants that they had been told they did NOT have to submit those materials unless they made it to the finals. I have heard from many of the 17 or so people who entered this year’s taxslayer contest and only ONE of them said he mailed taxslayer the aforementioned Beta Tapes, AVI file and notarized(!) release forms. And he had search for Taxslayer’s home office number and CALL them to find out where these materials should be shipped because the rules didn’t say.
Taxslayer's so-called contest "release form." Click to enlarge
Taxslayer pulled its contest website down but with a little googling I was able to find an archived copy of the release form Mr. Walker said I needed to submit for my entry to be valid. Turns out, the document is titled “TaxSlayer.com Commercial Production Agreement.” I’ll post an image of it. It is very clear that it is not a release form. It is an agreement between Taxslayer and anyone who WINS the contest. In fact, there is a space for Jimmy Rhodes, the HEAD OF TAXSLAYER.COM to sign! It could be argued that it was the contestant’s responsibility to get Mr. Rhodes to sign the agreement and if you left that space blank, the form was technically incomplete. And check out the details of that production agreement. It says you must send taxslayer 5 BETA TAPE copies of each of your commercials. Only professional production companies would have a beta deck. So the cost of having a post house makes some dubs for you would probably be a few hundred dollars. If taxslayer.com actually expected you to enter into a signed agreement with the head of their company and send in 10 Beta tapes (5 for the 15 second version of your entry and 5 for the 30 second version) then they placed obstacles to entry that were so insurmountable that they would NEVER get 25 “official” entries. It seems that no matter how thorough a contestant might be, there would always be some loophole that would keep an entry from being valid. In short, the rules of this contest and the misinformation given to contestants ensured that this contest was 100% un-winnable.
So all this leads to one big question; Was the 2010 Taxslayer contest a scam? It seems that the organizers of the contest went out of their way to see that NO ONE could win. The head of the contest told contestants NOT to send materials in that his boss, Darcell Walker now says were MANDATORY for a submission to be valid. Is it possible that Daniel Eubanks SABOTAGED this contest? The whole promotion was canceled because they didn’t receive enough entries. But it now seems that agents of taxslayer.com actively worked to ensure that they would NEVER receive enough “legitimate” entries. I submitted my first entry a day before the deadline and I submitted my second entry 12 hours before the deadline. Why didn’t Taxslayer e-mail me back and say “hey, what about your beta tapes and AVI files?” Didn’t they WANT to get valid and complete entries? And why didn’t the taxslayer rules even say WHERE these materials should be sent? And in what kind of universe would they ever need 5 beta tapes of each version of the entry? If they received 25 entries consisting of two videos each (15 sec and 30 sec) that would mean they would have received 250 BETA TAPES! And that’s just if the minimum number of contestants entered.
There are only two possibilities here. Either Darcel Walker of Taxslaer.com lied to me in an attempt to prevent me from me being compensated for work I did after recived a written guarantee about that work from his colleague or the contest was a scam and Taxslayer knew they would never have to award any prizes. They put a clause in their rules that said that they had the option to void the contest if not enough valid entries were received and then they made it virtually impossible for contestants to submit valid entries. If this is what actually happened then we are getting into some dark territory. If Taxslayer let people waste their time and money on a contest that could not be won then we could be looking at an honest to goodness act of FRAUD. We are beyond screwing filmmakers and breaking contracts. We are now talking about a possible criminal act.
But what would taxslayer have to gain from running a video contest and then making it impossible to win? Free publicity maybe? One big reason companies run video contests is because the announcement of those contests always get a little press coverage. And one reader who entered this year’s contest actually suggested to me that Taxslayer may have held off on canceling the contest because they wanted the suckers who entered to do some free promotion for their company. See, the taxslayer rules stated that the 25 videos ranked highest by “the youtube audience” would make the finals. So, during the three week-long period between the submission deadline and the day the contest was officially canceled, filmmakers promoted their entries to family and friends and on their social networks totally unaware that they were giving free advertising to a company that was about to screw them.
But the thing that Taxslayer really had to to gain was cheap or even free content. A video posted by Taxslayer that explains the contest states the following:
Upon submittal, all videos become the property of taxslayer.com and the creator relinquishes all ownership and rights to the video.
Holy S&%*. That statement right there could mean that taxslayer intends to use the entries they got (or more likely, the ideas in those entries) and not pay the people who created them! That would be pretty outrageous though. I think it is more likely that Taxslayer will try to buy entries at prices way below the original prize amount. My theory is that taxslayer knew that no one would create tv-quality videos for them for only a few grand. So they dangled $20,000 in prize money in front of us to get us to enter while possibly knowing there was no way in the world they would receive enough complete entries for the contest to be valid. I suspect that they intentionally lied to filmmakers and told them whatever they wanted to hear (the contest won’t be canceled, you don’t need to send in beta tapes) just to get them to enter. I think it was their plan all along to cancel the contest and scoop up their favorite entries for a song later on.
Though Darcel Walker of taxslayer.com is trying to bluff me into thinking otherwise, I believe I DID officially enter the 2010 taxslayer video contest. The head of that contest told contestants that the release forms and tapes and AVI files were not required unless a video was selected for the finals. I did not submit those materials because of Mr. Eubanks’ instruction. So either Mr. Eubanks was lying when he said the additional materials were not required at the time of submission or Mr. Walker is lying to me when he says those materials were required at the time of submission. Either way, employees of Taxslayer.com/Rhodes Financial Services have behaved unethically and now it looks like they may have possibly even committed a crime. Here is a brief explanation of what constitutes fraud:
Fraud must be proved by showing that the defendant’s actions involved five separate elements: (1) a false statement of a material fact,(2) knowledge on the part of the defendant that the statement is untrue, (3) intent on the part of the defendant to deceive the alleged victim, (4) justifiable reliance by the alleged victim on the statement, and (5) injury to the alleged victim as a result.
Let’s break this down and see if taxslayer’s actions fit this definition of fraud:
1. a false statement of a material fact
Head of the Taxslayer contest Daniel Eubanks told me that the contest would “definitely not” be canceled due to lack of entries and he told contestants that they did not need to mail beta tapes and AVI files for their submissions to count. The contest was eventually canceled due to lack of entries and according to Mr. Eubank’s boss, the Beta tapes and AVI files WERE required for a submission to count.
2. knowledge on the part of the defendant that the statement is untrue
Whether or not Mr. Eubanks knew he was lying to contestants cannot be known at this time. However, since he was the head of the Taxslayer contest I can’t imagine he didn’t know he was misleading contestants. If Mr. Eubanks told the truth, then Mr. Walker intentionally lied to me when he said I did not officially enter the contest.
3. intent on the part of the defendant to deceive the alleged victim
Mr. Eubanks told contestants things that turned out not to be true. He did this because I believe he knew that if he told them otherwise, they would not enter the contest. If Mr. Eubanks lied in his letter to me he did so knowing that my entries were valid in the hopes that I would drop this matter.
4. justifiable reliance by the alleged victim on the statement
I entered the taxslayer contest because Mr. Eubanks falsely told me the contest would not be canceled. I and other filmmakers did not submit Beta Tapes and AVI files because Mr. Eubanks told contestants that they were only required if an entry was selected for the finals. If Mr. Walker is lying, he did so to try and get me to give up on my efforts to collect on my invoice.
5. injury to the alleged victim as a result.
The invoice I sent to Taxslayer for my expenses and time as a writer, cinematographer and editor totaled $4,347. Every other filmmaker that did not submit Beta Tapes, release forms and AVI files because Mr. Eubanks told them not to wasted their time and money creating invalid entries for the taxslayer contest. If Mr. Walker lied, he refused to accept my invoice for untrue reasons.
This matter has suddenly become very serious. If you entered the 2010 taxslayer contest and were told that you did NOT have to submit beta tapes, release forms and AVI files until after your video was selected as a finalist, or if you entered this contest and are concerned that you may be the victim of fraud, please e-mail me at .
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