If nothing else, a "contest" can be a front used to harvest personal information from large numbers of people ("All you need to enter is your name, your birthdate, your phone number, your bank account number..."). Or it could be FREE* (*for the first hit).

Contest regulations usually involve what the contest conditions can be, what the prize can be, the fact that there must actually be a prize, how fair the contest must be ("employees and their families excluded"), and how well-published all of the contest rules must be (i.e. how fine the print is allowed to be).

Contest scams are designed to look safe and harmless. That's the entire point of the scam. And that's the entire point of policing contests. Think of all the iPods and shopping cards you've "won" via SMS/email/monkey-punching/etc.

But different jurisdictions have different ideas about what should and should not be allowed, and so you get this thread right here.