Every now and then, towns will have pop-up, arcade-style county fairs, complete with food, drinks, rides and games. Some of these games even offer players the opportunity to win trinkets, snacks or cash prizes.
Not all games are created equal, however. One man is going viral for feeling scammed out of a $10,000 county fair cash prize from a Key Master game.
‘They had one for $10,000’
In a video that has more than 580,000 views, TikTok content creator @notsrry4u described a frustrating experience he had at the LA County Fair in Pomona, California.
“I’m only making this video because I don’t want anybody else to fall for the same scam,” the creator said in his video. “But yesterday at the LA County Fair, my family went for Mother’s Day. And eventually, it was my mom, grandmother, aunt, my cousin, her boyfriend, my dad, my brother and I, and we all went to the fair.”
The creator said that at some point, he and his brother went off by themselves to play some games while the rest of their family shopped around various vendors’ stalls. That’s when the creator bumped into a Key Master game.
“We went into Expo Hall 4, which is where this vendor is, and they have games there,” the creator said. “Like, they have a Key Master … In the Key Master, they had, like, Jordans, they had iPhones with money on it, and then they had one for $10,000.”
Starting the Key Master game
The Key Master game the creator was playing charged $1 per attempt. The creator scanned his card for five separate tries. He missed his first try as he went for the iPhone column. For his second try, he decided to go for the column that had a $10,000 cash prize.
Key Masters are games in which players use joystick controls to line the titular “key” up with whichever column holds their desired prize. Once they release their hold, the key ascends into the keyhole; if the key successfully enters the keyhole, the player wins a corresponding prize according to whichever column they selected.
“So I go for it,” the creator said. “The key goes in, turns upside down, and pulls it out, and I’m like, ‘Oh, crazy. $10,000. I won.’ It doesn’t fall, though.”
The prize doesn’t drop
He said the key then went back and forth a couple times, but the prize still didn’t drop. The machine showed an “error” message. So he went to seek help from the vendor managing the Key Master. The vendor then told the creator he couldn’t pay him out.
“I was like, ‘That doesn’t make any sense,’” the creator said. “So he’s like, ‘The best I could do is offer you…’ First, he tried to offer me $5 back … because I scanned my card, right? And I was like, ‘Nah’ … And then he tried to offer me another $5 and a Labubu … But I was like, ‘No, that’s kind of crazy that you’re offering me that.’”
The creator obtained the manager’s card, as well as the service number of the Key Master machine. By that point, the rest of his family had arrived. They involved themselves in the situation.
“Then, you know, lo and behold, they don’t have the money to pay people out,” the creator said.
The vendor defends himself on-camera
In a follow-up video, the creator shared a partial, two-and-a-half-minute confrontation with the Key Master vendor, who maintained that he did nothing wrong.
“I’m not saying you can’t win,” the vendor said in the video. “I’m saying the game had a malfunction in it. And when the machine has malfunction, I can’t honor the game.”
The vendor then said he didn’t know what the malfunction was or why the prize didn’t drop after the creator won it. He also said “there’s no way in [expletive]” for him to force the machine to show an error message or to otherwise rig it.
Viewers weigh in
Under the creator’s initial video, multiple viewers left comments urging him to take legal action. One person pointed out that “California has very strict consumer protection laws.”
“Can’t you sue them in small claims for false advertising?” one commenter said. The creator replied, “Believe so we’re looking into our options now.”
“As someone who has sued and won in CA small claims court, you need to sue them,” one viewer commented. Another replied, “This! It’s a B to go through the process but it’s worth it when you win. he’d have to act fast to get all the info and serve him tho before the fair leaves.”
One viewer even questioned whether the vendor had a license.
“They should have a license to run a game with a cash prize,” they wrote. “The Bureau of Gambling Control has an incident report form and the LA County Attorney’s Office has a Consumer Fraud form.”
Previous Key Master scandals
This isn’t the first scandal to embroil Key Master games.
In 2021, “a class action [claimed] the Key Master game is not one of skill but instead rigged to prevent consumers from winning until a set number of unsuccessful plays has been met.” Polygon wrote that “the proposed class action lawsuit [was] looking for Sega, Sega Amusements, and Komuse to disclose on Key Master machines that they aren’t necessarily games of skill, and to pay $5 million in damages for ‘misleading consumers.’”
“‘Nowhere on the Key Master Machine do Defendants inform consumers of the truth: that the machines are rigged so that players can only win prizes at certain times,’ lawyers for [the plaintiff] said in the lawsuit,” Polygon wrote. “… The problem here is that Key Master isn’t marketed as a game of chance. It’s portrayed as ‘a simple game of pure skill with a straight-forward directive.’”
According to ScreenRant, Sega ended up sending out conversion kits to arcades and vendors to turn Key Master into a new game called Prize Locker. Polygon reported that Prize Locker has “the same design, but it’s 100% skill-based.”
It is unclear whether the LA County Fair is in possession of an old, now-discontinued Key Master model that is no longer in commercial circulation, rather than the updated Prize Locker.
Buzz News has reached out to the LA County Fair via two emails, as well as the creator via TikTok comment.
