[Closed] Competition website craze ?

easy way to make money / scam people.

sell tickets for twice the cost of the prize.

easy way to make money / scam people.

Is it a scam? Buy classic car for £20k, sell 2,000 raffle tickets at £20 each, give car to winner. Seems a sensible business idea. As long as there is actually a car which someone wins the this isnt a scam?
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I suspect most of those facebook ones are scams, like and share this post and someone will win this camper van tomorrow, as I understand it this is to get a lot of people to like a page, which they then sell and can bombard those people with spam from. None of them ever say who won the thing...

But the volume of people desperate enough required to sustain all these sites where basic maths shows the person who's winning here...... It's blatantly obvious they are having folks pants down often it's not even by a reasonable amount often it is as Andrewh says... Twice as much as the prize costs......and that's even after they have inflated the value of the prize.

But more so why have they all of a sudden become popular ...I mean surely they need a gambling license for this or have the rules been relaxed recently ? - talking the last 6 months or so these have popped up

People gamble though. Is a £20 ticket with a 1/2000 chance that bad? Better odds than a £1 lottery ticket at 1/14,000,000

The one that annoys me is the "win a million quid house" raffles....

Here in the south coast there's LOADS...i mean, properly loads!
I know of at least 3 houses within a 5 mile radius that are trying to 'sell' this way...

The outcome in pretty much all of them...

Raffle goes on MONTHS past the original closing date, or you win £30k instead , because they never sell enough tickets!!

DrP

Yes but the lottery is regulated.

I don't believe for one minute all these pop up raffle sites are legit never mind regulated*

* By regulated I mean audited to show the prize exists and that someone real wins.....not a friend of the supplier etc.

My Instagram feed is full of these lately... mostly for bikes or cars.

But the volume of people desperate enough required to sustain all these sites where basic maths shows the person who’s winning here…… It’s blatantly obvious they are having folks pants down often it’s not even by a reasonable amount often it is as Andrewh says… Twice as much as the prize costs……and that’s even after they have inflated the value of the prize. But more so why have they all of a sudden become popular …I mean surely they need a gambling license for this or have the rules been relaxed recently ? – talking the last 6 months or so these have popped up

I haven't ever considered entering enough to check the details - but:
1. there used to be people doing this in large shopping centres, airports etc with "the car" there to see. Some are probably just shifting "on-line" due to covid?
2. I've noticed a couple of youtube channels promoting this sort of thing - the profits* there are always going to some "worthy" cause.
3. if they all look and feel the same - someone is probably selling a "kit" to make doing it really easy - website templates, payment systems, T&Cs etc ready to use, perhaps even intro's to "cost price" prizes, or even acting as the promoter for the gambling rules.
4. people are gullible and willing to take a punt on £10/20 on the hope its real and they get lucky. Other people will spot an opportunity to cash in on gullible people.

I've no issue if they make a profit from a legitimate prize, especially if they have actually carried a real risk (not selling enough tickets).

*notice I said profits - I always assume that the organising company is taking a big slice to cover their "costs"!

Funnily enough though, a work colleague recently just won a mini cooper S woks John Cooper edition, and £70k cash... !!!

Lucky git!

DrP

I suspect most of those facebook ones are scams, like and share this post and someone will win this camper van tomorrow, as I understand it this is to get a lot of people to like a page, which they then sell and can bombard those people with spam from. None of them ever say who won the thing…

Yeah if the prize is too big to believe then I'd be very suspect, but I have a friend who likes and shares a lot of these for small things and seems to win fairly often. Based on her luck I suspect that whilst there are prizes, the selection may not be entirely random - and some of them pick people who are likely to shout about the win on social media too!

A lot of them seem to be a way of getting free advertising. E.g. on Pinkbike giveaways for bike merch. "Advertise our stuff and we'll give away £1,000 of stuff". Basically the cost of the prize is less than they would have to spend on targeting eyeballs via social media and people are more likely to share 'organically'.

You can usually spot the Facebook ones if you take more than three seconds to look at it. Whilst it is at least theoretically plausible that "Audi UK" might be giving away an A3 in exchange for likes and shares, it's highly unlikely indeed that the real Audi UK would only have 76 followers on a page that was created last week.

Have the very occasional dabble (no more than a fiver about once a quarter) with BOTB and South Coast suspension dream bike competition.

People gamble though. Is a £20 ticket with a 1/2000 chance that bad? Better odds than a £1 lottery ticket at 1/14,000,000

Since they changed the rules it’s much less likely than 1 in 14 million, btw.

I have an occasional dabble on the South Coast Suspension Dream Bike weekly or monthly thing. Will be the only way I ever get a Swarf Contour, Curtis, Starling or other ultra niche bike to stare at. I’m happy for somebody else to win a lovely bike for the price of a couple of tickets every now and then.

I created a website for a car raffle competition (they also did some tech comps too), all genuine, run by a long time customer of ours. At the moment there are a lot of these sites springing up, with some big hitters that have been around for a while.

The site I did, they did alright, but it was not profitable. You need to spend a fortune on advertising to be seen when starting out. It has stopped doing competitions now, but they had a range of cars, from hot hatches to some average cars.

I see Dream Car Giveaway, 7dayperformance and some others doing the best at the moment. But I have noticed the lower ticket sales on some (7days seems to not selling out consistently).

Eventually the bubble will burst and only a handful will remain. Or they will get more regulated.

I think currently to be classed as a raffle competition, they also have to offer a way to enter for free (postal entry). However I have noticed some websites (looking at Dream Car Giveaway here) who only empty their PO box every Monday, but most of the competitions sell out well before collection day.