Its quite simple, that would never happen, and in a prize draw like that you ALWAYS see 'no purchase necessary', and usually says you can enter by sending your entry by post without buying anything. The reason for this is to ensure they don't require a gambling license to run the draw.
This was not a free prize draw, a purchase was necessary and there was no free entry route therefore is classed as a lottery under the gambling act 2005.
A term saying they can change things ant any time doesn't apply to products like this, a companies terms and conditions do not over ride the law.
ok, see you have contradicted yourself there straight away. You say it was a free prize draw, but then in the next paragraph clearly state to enter you had to purchase gambling services. Therefore it wasn't a free to enter prize draw was it, and as such, under the Gambling Act, is clearly classed as a lottery.
The simple test is, if someone did not make a deposit could they get a ticket to the draw? If yes then it was a prize draw and not covered by the act, if no then it is a lottery and covered by the act.
A lottery has three essential elements:
1 Payment is required to participate
2 One or more prizes are awarded
3 Those prizes are awarded by chance
Which of those did this not have?
So did anyone get more than one entry to the final 50 draw? Like if someone had 5 tickets were they all entered in the initial draw or was it one per person?
Bit more on legal definitions
If a competition does not satisfy the skill requirement,
it will be a lottery unless either no payment is required to participate in the competition (whether this is to enter the competition, or to find out if you have won, or to collect a prize) or there is an alternative free entry route. It is irrelevant whether the payment benefits the person running the competition or someone else, e.g. a telecoms company providing the premium-rate telephone number used to participate in the competition.
As I have already said, I have no doubt the competition was fair, and was conducted completely above board, possibly with a few mistakes, but nevertheless nothing underhand. At the end of it its not as if you didn't pay the prize or anything, so can personally see no point whatsoever in cheating, which is what I think the person who brought this up was implying. However if you run a competition, of any sort, when someone asks for clarification that it was ran fairly, telling them to fuck off, calling them a sad loser and all the rest isn't what I would call acceptable. Obviously you do, so we have different viewpoints on how to treat customers. Thats fair enough.
Just to reiterate though - I personally don't think there was anything underhand went on, people won and if it were from the main draw or not it doesn't really matter, it probably shouldn't have been done like it was, but I can't see how anyone was disadvantaged by it.
