WASHINGTON — Ready for a scavenger hunt?
Free Washington Nationals tickets will be hidden around the D.C. region Tuesday afternoon, and to find them you need to look for a home plate.
Thirty home plates will be placed in high-traffic areas, such as around Metro stations.
If you see one and get to it first, you’ll find a pair of Nationals tickets waiting for you underneath.
But here’s the thing: The company behind the promotion, ID.me, would really like members of the armed forces, police officers, firefighters and EMTs to get the tickets.
So if you’re not one, they’re asking you to give away the tickets to someone who is.
“My company powers the military and first-responder verification program that allows the Washington Nationals to sell tickets at discounted prices up to 40 percent off to members of the military, veterans and then police, fire and EMTs as well,” Blake Hall, co-founder and CEO of ID.me, tells WTOP.
Hall is a former U.S. Army officer who led a battalion reconnaissance platoon in Iraq for 15 months in 2006 and 2007 and received two Bronze Stars.
After returning home, he went to Harvard Business School where he met a classmate who had been an Army Ranger like him.
“We noticed that there were a lot of retailers that had [discount] programs for members of the military or for students or teachers, in-store in their brick-and- mortar outlets, but those programs weren’t available on their website,” Hall says.
When they asked retailers why, they were told that online, there was no way to know for sure that a person who said they were a member of the military really was one.
ID.me’s technology solves that problem, and can save users quite a bit.
“Once they verify their service, they essentially can use us like a single sign-on to access military … discounts or first-responder discounts,” Hall says.
In addition to the Nationals, ID.me has teamed up to offer online discounts from dozens of companies including Overstock, Priceline, Under Armour and Uber.
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