22 September 2026
Qurium reveals how online “Win a free iPhone” and similar sweepstakes campaigns form part of an interconnected marketing ecosystem designed to collect, distribute and monetize participants’ personal data.
Qurium followed active sweepstakes advertisements from their initial landing pages through the companies receiving the data. The investigation identified two principal landing-page operators, Time Travel Promotion LP, registered in the United Kingdom through offshore owners, and Cyprus-based Seven Media Code Ltd.
The investigation found that these apparently separate operations repeatedly converge on infrastructure and companies associated with Norwegian digital advertising company Advertis AS. Among the links identified by Qurium are shared technical infrastructure, common data-handling entities and privacy-policy systems, as well as historical domain-registration records showing that verticalmailer.com, one of the investigated sweepstakes brands, was registered by Cristian Ghica, CEO of Advertis.
The investigation concludes that the sweepstakes ecosystem fragments responsibility between landing-page operators, data recipients and purported prize sponsors, making it difficult for participants to determine who ultimately controls their information, where it is distributed, and how they can effectively exercise their data-protection rights.
Needless to say, there is no control whatsoever whether someone actually wins a free iPhone, and in that case, how the selection process would look like.
Why it matters? Harvested personal data is a valuable resource for more sophisticated fraud operations often associated to obscure call-center campaigns. Access to names, phone numbers, email addresses, and other personal details allows scammers to identify, profile, and directly target potential victims. Without this data, many of these highly targeted and personalized scam campaigns would be far more difficult to operate at scale.
Why it is related to Qurium’s work? This investigation forms a part of Qurium’s series “Dark Ops Undercovered” where we expose malicious actors on the Internet involved in anything from fake take-down requests to protect the people in power to affiliate marketing actors and data harvest schemes.
Read the full investigation: Who is harvesting your personal data?
Qurium Media Foundation is an international non-profit organization that provides secure hosting, digital forensics, incident response, and infrastructure protection for journalists, human rights defenders, and public-interest media organizations worldwide. Its investigations focus on censorship, surveillance, digital attacks, and the infrastructures that enable them. Learn more at qurium.org.
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