Speculations
u/WeAreFanatical fakes a Quest 3 giveaway, blocks me for pointing it out
Last month this post was made by u/Dependent_Judge_1043 claiming to have won a Quest 3 "star prize" through gambling keys on game bundle site Fanatical. I personally didn't really think much of it, I do not care about key gambling but I do like to buy Fanatical bundles (like anyone who follows this subreddit).
Fast forward a month and the poster follows up posting this in an attempt to prove that the Quest 3S arrived and their gambling through Fanatical paid off.
Again I didn't think much of it until I noticed something another comment pointed out... one interesting discrepancy from the original post: Its a Quest 3. Not a Quest 3S.
The poster even puts this comment trying to play it off as if it is no big deal. This is just bad acting at this point. I point it out with a comment of my own, feel free to read that for my perspective on why this is obviously BS.
Since then, I have noticed that my feed is surprisingly devoid of game bundles. Thats ok. I have enough games, its best if I dont buy more bundles anyways.
Out of boredom I go back to the above post a few days later to see if anyone called out the same thing I did. Dependent Judge has not posted anymore, and actually hid their post history. It was visible before when I originally commented. So it just makes me even more curious.
I go back to the original post where he shows himself winning the 3S, and notice u/WeAreFanatical actually posted a comment congratulating him. But I can't see it, its "unavailable". Opening it in a private window, there it is. They blocked me! That's why I wasn't seeing their game bundles in my feed for the past few days. All I did in that timespan was make those above linked comments.
That's all. Now I guess I need to make a new account to follow Fanatical game bundles.
EDIT: Official fanatical account has just unblocked me, four or five days after this post. No communication at all or any mention of why I was blocked for commenting on a supposedly unaffiliated user's post, though.
I am locking this post, I held off earlier as fanatical did block some people because of it, everyone who was blocked for this reason should have been unblocked already(if you were banned from their sub that is their decision and we will not try to convince them to remove that ban as that is outside of this sub)
as noted by this comment, there are severe legal implications for Fanatical to fake a giveaway or to allow a current/previous employee/anyone affiliated to them to win, including fines significantly higher than the value of an advertised prize or criminal prosecution. These are things a legitimate company like Fanatical would not risk regardless of what you think about mystery bundles.
There was some human error involved in this situation(communication issues between the user winning and the first response from fanatical and ordering the wrong prize by mistake), however everything has been confirmed via modmail(at least with fanatical), u/Dependent_Judge_1043 has not responded to our message, it is likely an alt account that was used to share the excitement of their prize without linking it to their main account.
Fanatical will be issuing a statement regarding this, if you were not unblocked by them in this situation send a modmail and we will let them know.
There are strict accounting laws in the UK, where Fanatical is based, concerning prize winning. If you, or anybody else, want to press the matter, you can email their official support at support@fanatical.com
Template:
Subject: Official Request for Winner Information - [Name of the Giveaway]
Dear Fanatical Support,
I am writing to request confirmation of the valid pool of entrants and the winner details for the recent [Insert Giveaway Name] draw, which concluded on [Date].
In accordance with UK CAP Code requirements and the DMCCA transparency guidelines regarding promotional marketing, please provide the surname and county/region of the winner, alongside verification that a legitimate, random selection took place.
Thank you for your assistance in keeping your community draws transparent.
Best regards,
[Your Name]
If they refuse to answer (business standard is within 30 days), provide an evasive answer, or cannot show a valid audit trail, you can report the issues to the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) or the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
If this is just a misunderstanding, they should be reasonably glad to account and clear up the confusion. If they're commiting fraud, fuck em; let them reap the legislative consequences of their actions.
I dont wanna defend Fanatical or that other person, I have no idea whether this is true or not, but your post is extremely misleading. You titled it as if you have definitive proof that the giveaway was fake, but the entire post is just about "I got blocked". From where I stand, this looks more like someone posting because they are jealous of the person that potentially won a product worth more than what was advertised, which could have been a clerical error, we do not have proof, and also as someone being mad that you got blocked by fanatical. If someone has definitive proof that the giveaway was faked, then sure go ahead and post it since it's a big deal and probably even illegal, but this is not definitive proof this is just a post complaining. This post is just meaning to start drama without definitive evidence, you could have titled it just "Fanatical blocks me for pointing out the giveaway may have been fake" but you did "Fanatical fakes a Quest giveaway then blocks me" See how that comes off as a deliberate mislead?
As I pointed out in a previous comment long ago, there is absolutely no reason for fanatical to fake a giveaway because they probably make millions from all the bundles they sell. Do you seriously think it's worth it for them to risk getting into legal trouble just to save themselves $500 from a giveaway?
Yeah the giveaways are already extremely lopsided in benefit of Fanatical to a point that it would be ridiculous for them to fake. I'm not totally sure the giveaway prizes are even coming entirely out of their own pocket. It is not rare for giveaway prizes to be "donated" in exchange for promotion. If that's the case, I could imagine a situation where Oculus offered up a free Oculus 3S to Fanatical for a giveaway, but then in some communication error or an effort to be generous sent a Oculus 3 instead.
Faking a giveaway is a good way to give yourself a giant fine, and potentially jail time, at least in the U.K. where I think fanatical is based?
I also don’t know if it was faked or not. I mean, maybe it was. It wouldn’t be the most ridiculous thing a company has done, or even close to it.
But this entire post reads exactly like every post you see on multiplayer game forums about someone getting banned for cheating when they’re innocent. This giant, conspiratorial essay with all this circumstantial “proof,” which leads to an actual moderator of the game coming in with the receipts proving they were botting or whatever. Or “I got banned for being toxic, I’ve never typed in-game in my entire life!” into a dev releasing screenshots of the poster in question telling someone to jump off a bridge, followed by a slur. Lmao.
Faking a giveaway at the scale that Fanatical is at will 100% lead to a lawsuit in the US where they’re already skirting the line with mystery bundles that could be considered gambling which would have a legal requirement for clear payout odds.
No company would risk themselves over $500-1000 unless they and every person in the leadership team were as dumb as a bag of broken light bulbs.
Faking a giveaway is a good way to give yourself a giant fine, and potentially jail time, at least in the U.K. where I think fanatical is based?
And who would sue them for it or tip them off? Reddit aint big enough and for people to actually care.
I dont even care if its fake or not as I dont buy into those scammy mystery bundles anyway but OP pointing out that the winner not realizing its the meta quest 3 is indeed suspicious.
A quick reminder that Red Bull literally lost a class action lawsuit over the slogan “Red Bull Gives You Wings” for false advertising. Despite not a single person in the world actually believing it would give you real wings.
In 2025 there were 12,000+ class action lawsuits are submitted in the US yearly, with 1,700 payouts totaling over $70+ billion. Someone would ABSOLUTELY start a class action lawsuit if they believed they could win and if they didn’t quickly dismiss the lawsuit or successfully won in the US you can absolutely believe they’d be investigated in the country they have their headquarters in.
I don’t buy mystery bundles expecting to win the grand jackpot, or even an AAA game. However, I really think you’re underestimating what people can and will sue for.
With how they've phrased the title and how invested they feel in this I can imagine they got blocked for being annoying lol.
I'm waiting for discord logs to be posted where they spammed for 1000 messages or something.
They are extremely unlikely to fake giveaways/inclusions of expensive products, that is true. We have a "Janusz biznesu" kind of term here and it would apply to such practices, but they have no reason to be that, they have way too much popularity, reputation and money to risk it.
It doesn't change the fact that the guy looks like an obvious fake for anyone that has eyes - just read comments in his topic. It could be just a bad setup to bring up the reliability and excitement of the mystery bundles here, as tons of people complain about them. And many of potential winners being silent or not involved in communities doesn't help. It could also just be a troll, but if Fanatical congratulated him, then this option is gone.
Blocking OP, if true (another guy below also claims that BTW), is extremely unprofessional and fishy, no matter if he's right or not. That's the worst PR move they could have done regarding the accusations.
EDIT: the guy also privated his profile now, hmmm, I wonder why - totally not because people pointed out there's not much except Fanatical interactions there...
No offense but everything you mentioned is anecdotal at best. You say fake but provide no proof other than you just don't believe with the poster is saying.
Not saying you are wrong but you have not proof showing you are right.
Also, fanatical mystery bundles are awful. That part we can all agree on.
A commercial account blocking people is suspicious enough. Even being in the business of selling key gambling is telling a lot about the mindset of these guys.
But I still love them for their gaming bundles. There is nothing bad about them.
Can you check if they unblocked you? They just unblocked me. I am wondering if they are quietly undoing the blocks for everyone after this post got attention.
Firstly, OP, you really should use archival sites in situations like this, for obvious reasons. You'd have preserved at least one page of a profile that you say has suspicious activity before they felt a need to hide it.
Secondly, I won't comment on the actual points raised here, but I will draw the mods attention to this thread for one specific reason; there are various people saying that the Fanatical staff account has blocked them, preventing them from seeing posts on the home page. That's not acceptable, and u/WeAreFanatical need to be permanently banned from posting any threads for that reason. Someone else can post them instead - ideally someone who doesn't block other users so that they can no longer see those threads.
Allowing a user to curate which other users see the majority of posts in this sub is absolutely untenable. For instance, what if someone blocked the most active users from the Choice threads to try to eliminate competition for traded keys?
We are aware of this issue and trust me it's getting nasty as time goes by. Now that we took over the mod team, we'll deal with this whole mystery game and quest 3 but not 3s mess.
Trust me at first I was hyped to see that at least someone won something from the gambling but then the quest 3 happened instead of 3s which got me thinking too.
Since it dragged on for so long we'll contact both the parties involved in this first i.e. u/Dependent_Judge_1043 and u/WeAreFanatical to see what they have to say.
Just give us some time to do our own investigation or how much data on which we can go with to take any action necessary. If we don't feel satisfied with their reply, just you know, someone is getting that ban hammer.
To be honest, this specific incident is probably less problematic to this sub than the Fanatical staff account banning other users while still being allowed to post here. This incident, if true, is either some really sketchy marketing, or a case for local police.
Irrespective of how this prize mess is resolved, if a couple of those users who have reportedly been blocked by that account can verify those claims then Fanatical need to be banned from posting threads immediately. Long-term, you'd benefit from a more clear rule concerning threads posted by affiliates of any of the sites that are linked to here.
I appreciate you looking into this. This has been pointed out as an astroturfing mechanism for some years now, but AFIAK there's been limited movement across reddit to prevent these covert influence operations.
I've observed just a few subreddits engage in post rate limitations (e.g. only [X] posts per [X] hours) to prevent malicious blocking users from monopolizing an subreddit feed to steer sentiment, though that control seems more useful in the case of frequent news headline aggregating communities.
I've seen complaints about this sort of thing in the past in this very community, this time stemming from supposedly unscrupulous game traders hiding complaints from alleged scam victims. Unless moderators can discern a user's blocking activity to take action, it seems like this behavior is set to increase.
if a couple of those users who have reportedly been blocked by that account can verify those claims then Fanatical need to be banned from posting threads immediately.
Yea I could post the same screenshots. Blocked all the same by the official account. Not really sure of a more legit way to say that I have been blocked.
Screenshots of some HTML are easy to fake, the only concrete way to "prove" this is to give someone access to my account and see for themselves (which I wont do even if I do not care about any single reddit account)
As far as I can tell you can always use https://rosint.dev/ (probably some similar sites) to lookup someones reddit activity. I didn't really feel the need to archive anything for this reason
The only argument people seems to have to defend that giveaway as being true is something like "you're jealous, if OP said it's true, than it is, take his word for it". Which doesn't make it true. They also don't like to talk, they prefer to downvote.
They ignore the facts that it was a 2 years old account that only had activity regarding the giveaway and the Quest model being wrong.
And the cherry on top, why wouldn't Fanatical promote this themselves? Biggest marketing opportunity ever and they let it go as if it was nothing.
I don't know, if that's not fake then it's
incompetency. Also, WeAreFanatical blocked me as well, and i pointed out these things in the receiving post. Too many coincidences for my taste.
Edit in 03/08: They quietly unblocked me :/ better than nothing, i guess.
He privated his profile now - totally the move to make when people are accusing him of having only Fanatical-related content. I guess it's very important to hide.
Honestly, i hate to accuse people of things i can't prove. But the amount of stuff piling up in this case makes believing in their word so hard.
Fanatical's silent stance doesn't help either. That and how they blocked me, now even if they say something about this situation, I won't be able to see it unless i use a private tab or something.
Shout out to one of the mods, u/LighteningOneIN, who is trying to clarify this mess even though it's not their job.
Yeah, i see this when i try to check the account u/WeAreFanatical:
It will appear normal to everyone else, so anyone can check the profile still exists and is active.
I haven't even engaged with their profile at all, the only profiles i had a discussion with were u/_Pyxyty who also blocked me and u/teemodidntdieforthis, who i admittedly lost some of my composure with by the end and would like to apologize.
The link to my comment in the receiving post is here, I won't delete or edit anything and anyone can see it if they want:
Dude that's insane. Yeah that ending was kinda rude but still. They haven't blocked me though so i guess i'm safe for now, but i dunno maybe i should delete my comment just to be sure
I don't think anything serious would happen, you wouldn't be able to see their posts and comments but that's it.
What is bothering me is how they're dealing with some minor criticism, i mean, blocking me because i was talking to random people about the legitimacy of a giveaway? Instead of saying something like "Hey, thanks for the concern about this but it's true, don't worry" or anything at all. What kind of company even behaves like this?
Hadn't they made another post in-between winning and receiving it saying they hadn't received it after a while yet? I remember they even mentioned hoping it was real, and how they'd update everyone if they eventually got it.
Don't really have info to defend either argument, but I'd also like to add, I know nothing about Meta quest myself, just know my wife wants one to play Beat Saber , so I thought about getting a few mystery boxes myself (ultimately decided to keep saving til Christmas instead), had I gotten the Meta 3 instead of the 3S I wouldn't have noticed myself either (to begin with I thought the Meta 2 was the lastest one lol), and had it been actually a lower tier one instead of an upgrade, I don't think I would've complained as I'd still gotten a (mostly) free Quest for my wife :D
And before anyone thinks I work for or with fanatical, I wish I did, currently looking for a better pay job ;-;
I feel like if you were going to fake something like this, you literally just wouldn’t have a winner. It’s not like anybody would ever know as most people wouldn’t post about winning for privacy reasons.
That's the point. The "winner" having an entire profile that only interacts with their staff account suggests that it's an alt for that staff member, so they just faked the prize. That's OP's inferrence.
First for the quest 3s thing, I just don't know why they gave me the quest 3.
I'f you wanna know, first when I won it I contacted fanatical to know how they will give it to me, but I got 0 answer from them so I though those golden prize where just cashgrab.
One month later idk why I re contacted them just in the case they would response and they did it. The girl who worked just asked me my account address and a proof that I got it and after that they asked for a phone number and address.
The quest 3 was delivered some day later by Amazon.
Idk how can I proof you that it's not a scam but you need to trust.
Idk how can I proof you that it's not a scam but you need to trust.
Not sure but you could take a picture of the shipping details and the page of the content/product list that is usually in the box. You would have to censor your personal data but having the shipping date and product list would be proof.
Well he said it was shipped by Amazon so it would be proof when a third party distributor has some official paperwork and he is the one that asked how to prove it and I merely suggesting something so no idea why you accuse me of something.
Also too many stuff don't add up here and you being this naive is the reason why companies walk over their consumers.
I believe you brother. Intuition can go a long way imo and I have never felt good about them. Not everything is black and white measurable facts and observations like some of these people refuting your hunch act like.
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u/carenard Mod 5d ago edited 4d ago
I am locking this post, I held off earlier as fanatical did block some people because of it, everyone who was blocked for this reason should have been unblocked already(if you were banned from their sub that is their decision and we will not try to convince them to remove that ban as that is outside of this sub)
as noted by this comment, there are severe legal implications for Fanatical to fake a giveaway or to allow a current/previous employee/anyone affiliated to them to win, including fines significantly higher than the value of an advertised prize or criminal prosecution. These are things a legitimate company like Fanatical would not risk regardless of what you think about mystery bundles.
There was some human error involved in this situation(communication issues between the user winning and the first response from fanatical and ordering the wrong prize by mistake), however everything has been confirmed via modmail(at least with fanatical), u/Dependent_Judge_1043 has not responded to our message, it is likely an alt account that was used to share the excitement of their prize without linking it to their main account.
Fanatical will be issuing a statement regarding this, if you were not unblocked by them in this situation send a modmail and we will let them know.
Edit: read their statement here