Beetle Mania Gets Extreme

A West Des Moines man admits to going “overboard a little bit” when he tried to win a Volkswagen Beetle at the Iowa State Fair.

In her Reader’s Watchdog Column in the Des Moines Register, investigative reporter Lee Rood reported that Nathan Brennecke, 32, a “numbers guy” at John Deere Financial, entered Lithia Volkswagen of Johnston’s contest about 4,000 times. The contest involved guessing how many plastic balls filled the car, but didn’t place limits on the number of times a person entered.

Then, three days before the end of the contest on Aug.18, the Johnston dealership reportedly took down the original rules and replaced it rules that prohibited more than one entry per person and also prescribed that the winner would be selected from five randomly drawn names and only if one of those people correctly guessed the number of balls. None of the five people whose names were drawn won the car.

Brennecke told The Register that he guessed the number of balls – 1,184 – and would have won the car under the original rules, something he claimed Lithia general manager Anthony Gladney confirmed.

“He verified I was the only person … but said the original stated prize of a 2013 VW Beetle … would not be awarded,” Brennecke told the reporter. “As a goodwill gesture, he offered me a free one-year lease, which is a far cry from the originally listed prize, and I declined.”

When Rood contacted Gladney, he said that although he wasn’t “accusing” Brennecke, the rules were changed after someone created a computer virus that generated thousands of entries “faster than any human could,” causing the dealership’s servers to crash.

Brennecke denied having created a virus that would overwhelm the servers.

“I did the math, and I decided the number had to be between 1,000 and 2,000,” he reportedly said. “Then I entered a hundred here and a different hundred there. If I was going to use software, I would have made a million entries all at once and done them sequentially.”

Gladney reportedly admitted to Rood that although the original rules didn’t prohibit multiple entries, the intention was never to give away a car and the grand prize was always going to be a two-year lease.

Brennecke also contacted the Iowa Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Division, which is looking into the situation.

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