Help - I’m feeling really stupid about the receipt lottery.
Main question: I got an emailed announcement from the e-invoice system that I’ve got a receipt worth $200. Yay. But: how do I claim this? I have no idea what the actual purchase was. Do I need to dig that up somehow? Can I just show this email to a 7-11 clerk?
I have never installed any apps. I have never scanned anything. All I’ve ever done for receipts is taken a piece of paper to a convenience store or bank and gotten money.
Secondary issue: I only just figured out that purchases from Amazon (i.e. Kindle books!) are also in this system; if you click a few levels deep into your order, you can see the number and print it out. I guess the einvoice system is automatically looking at these, and that one of these is the prize-winner, but I’m not sure [EDIT: yup, I eventually figured out that’s exactly what’s going on]. Should I be compiling these receipt numbers as well to look at? Is the same thing going on with Apple, Patreon, iHerb, and whatever else? Are there lottery receipt numbers out in the ether? I already get emails with those receipt numbers for Spotify, Netflix, and Steam, so those don’t confuse me. But until today I’d thought that, if I didn’t get an emailed GUI-whatever receipt, that purchase wasn’t part of the lottery system.
I hope that’s all done automatically, because, well, it probably wouldn’t be worth the hassle. But now I’m trying to figure out how much hassle is involved in actually claiming them.
EDIT: I suspect this page (already linked above) gives me the answer, and I am trying to puzzle my way through it, but … it’s not easy!
You should have an account on https://www.einvoice.nat.gov.tw if you use digital receipts.
There you can set up automatic payout to a bank account.
I also linked some services to automatically use my digital receipt account there. e.g. pchome, wemo, easy card
Some other services just ask for your ‘Mobile phone barcode’ to associate the digital receipts. e.g. GoShare
Thanks … OK, I’ve installed and registered with the iOS app first, and then the website. But I may have shot myself in the foot because I used my “main” email address to register, yet these receipt winnings are actually on a different email alias.
They might be on the account associated to your mobile phone number. Depends how you signed up. Avoid having multiple accounts.
Make sure the ‘Mobile phone barcode’ (手機條碼) is the same as in the winnings email.
於ibon機台點選「生活服務」
2.點選「電子發票」
3.點選「綠界科技」(In this part you need to select the e-invoice provider)
4.點選「列印中獎發票證明聯」
5.閱讀服務需知，並點選「同意，繼續下一步」
6.輸入中獎發票的「發票號碼」，點選「下一步」(Enter the “invoice number” of the winning invoice )
7.輸入中獎發票的「隨機碼」，點選「下一步」(Enter the “random code” number of the winning invoice)
8.顯示中獎發票資訊，並按「選擇」
9.顯示中獎明細並列印
10.列印發票並進行兌獎
Source:
The part that could be confusing is to know which company is the e-invoicing Provider in Taiwan for the product that you bought
The I-Bon Kiosk will show you some options of e-invoicing providers :
I never signed up until today. Oh man … cell phone is in my wife’s name, I use five or six different email addresses for purchases and registrations. Maybe that’s why I keep getting error messages when I try to log in today, and then it logs in anyway, or seems to tell me I need to change the password, but then I can’t change the password, and then the rest of the app works anyway.
Is that information provided anywhere on the e-invoice notification email? I’ve got dozens of different Amazon orders I could look through to figure out what which order it actually is (if it’s even Amazon!), each one taking … I dunno, maybe 30-40 seconds? And that email doesn’t even tell me the full receipt number, just the first three and final three letters, with the four in the middle asterisked out.
the e-invoice email you received is only a notification
you need to find the e-mail of the e-invoice Provider
try to use the following keywords in your Email search bar to check these invoices :
電子發票開立通知 , GUI
Thanks. Unfortunately Amazon does not send that information (other sellers do: I’ve got them for Spotify, Netflix, Steam, etc.). But the Amazon order confirmations contain no information about the GUI. There’s a link in the email to “View Order Details”, and I need to click that; and once that page opens, I can click again to choose “Invoice”; and now I can see, in the bottom corner of that, the Invoice Period & Invoice Number (for the lottery receipts). But I have many, many Amazon orders I’d have to look through.
I have good records of every GUI number I’ve received. However, I’ve got an email telling me I’ve won for a GUI number I do not have in my records (I’m mildly surprised I’m getting these emails when I don’t recall ever registering for them) - so now I’m trying to figure out how to identify just which order it may have been, if it was even Amazon. There are probably other international orders where I’ve got an GUI # out there, and didn’t realize it.
EDIT: Hey, after quite a bit of searching, I found the relevant invoice on Amazon’s website, by digging through orders. Well that’s an absurdly inefficient way to try to claim a $200 prize. I should never mock the women filling bags with chopped onions at Costco again. Um … there’s no random code / 隨機碼 on this: does that matter? Nor do I have a clue who the e-invoicing provider would be; the invoice is entirely in English.
Thanks for helping walk me through this. OK, I’ve downloaded the app and registered, although I’m mainly using the website. I’ve changed it over to the same email address as the one that got the you-won-a-prize-email-notification.
Is the app “retroactive”? Will it see winnings connected to that email address before today, or is it only going to start working for the prizes announced next month? I’ve looked at a couple of places where it seems like they should be (e.g. the “中獎發票查詢”), but I don’t see anything. When I search it gives me “查無中獎發票” (“Check no winning invoice”?) at the top.
While we’re on the subject, I have a question too: do all companies who send e-receipts by email automatically notify you if you win also? Uber emailed me once to let me know that I won, and I was able to go to an iBon and claim it. But when I just get a receipt emailed to me, I ignore it. I know you can click a link and go to a govt site to record the eGUI or something, but if they’re all gonna do what Uber did then there’s no need.
Well, I went to a 7-11 today, the printed PDF of the $200-prize winning invoice from Amazon in hand, and then I left the 7-11 with $600 cash.
I am completely incapable of telling people the procedure for this, beyond “Give the receipt to the clerk, show her the announcement email, look helpless, and see what happens.” The clerk was insanely helpful through the following 30 minutes and kept switching between my iPhone and the iBon machine, and I kept typing in my email address and a password from that invoice app (which I needed to reset because I had absolutely no memory of what it was, because who on earth remembers passwords for apps these days?!). And eventually the iBon machine informed us that not only had I won $200 from a Sept/Oct receipt, I’d also won $200 each from two more July/August receipts. Typed in many more numbers (EARTHQUAKE!), and exchanged the receipts for $600. And bought beer.
I definitely need to figure out this app more, and connect it to a bank account. The procedure over the past two days was NOT worth $200, but may have been worth $600.
They’re good for a while - six months or so? What I’m curious about is if I was notified of those two winners back in September, and accidentally erased the email, or if I received no notifications at all. As @kurupted suggested above - things are a lot easier if these “out in the wild” internet receipts are automatically checked, because looking through them is a pain.
They’re announced on the 25th of each odd month: so January 25th will be the Nov-Dec numbers.
If you look on the back of the old-style long receipts, you can see the dates, as well as when you can redeem them: so for example, Nov-Dec can be redeemed from Feb. 6 through to May 5.
And, huh, the bookmark for the numbers, one that I was using as recently as two days ago, is no longer working, so I won’t bother linking it.
