Yet another property raffle promotion has been banned by the advertising watchdog.
Raffle House was promoted on Facebook and on its website last November but two complainants challenged how fair it was because they said the method of entry was changed during the promotion, from ‘pay before play’.
The ASA itself challenged whether the absence of a closing date was a breach of the advertising code.
Raffle House told the ASA that one change meant that consumers could pay for a ticket after answering a multi-choice question correctly, rather than buying the ticket before attempting to answer the question.
It said that it had created a “fair and equitable” environment for customers affected by the change, as they had been given free entry to the competition as well as being entered into a cash give-away.
Raffle House said it had received complaints about its previous ‘pay before play’ model.
Raffle House said that the Facebook post did not have a closing date on it, but Facebook followers would already have been aware of this.
The complaints were however upheld. The ASA said that because Raffle House had given older entrants free entry to the prize draw, this was unfair to new participants.
The closing date should have been given, the ASA also said.
It added that during the course of its investigation, it found that the closing date had been extended from last June to this. The ASA said this was also a breach.
Last week, the ASA also uphold complaints about another ‘win a house’ promotion.
Win a Mega Home Ltd had advertised a draw for a £3m home in the New Forest, with the runner up winning an Aston Martin.
Eighteen people said that the prizes or reasonable equivalents had not been awarded and complained to the ASA.
Win a Mega Home Ltd said that actual tickets sales had fallen significantly below what was expected, and were just over £737,000. After the 25% retention specified in the conditions, and costs were deducted, it left a prize of £110,070.
The ASA said this was not a reasonable equivalent to a £3m house and that no prize had been awarded to a runner up.
The complaints were upheld.
The ASA has received a string of complaints about win a house’ promotions – often run to avoid estate agents’ fees – and last year issued specific advice on the subject.
https://www.asa.org.uk/advice-online/promotional-marketing-house-raffles.html
Comments (2)
I think raffle house is a scam. you can complain on trustpilot but be careful because they are reporting all the bad reviews to get trustpilot to hide them so they can fool more people into buying tickets which also makes them look like scammers when they do stuff like that so be careful what you write – stick to the facts and don’t use any bad language! i’m going to complain to trading standards for false advertising i think they might give me my money back and stop them scamming other people. i think raffle house is a con and not safe or transparent at all. i wouldn’t trust them, they tell you different numbers of tickets they needed to sell to give the house away each time you ask and they changed the draw date twice which was not in the terms and conditions to start with and changed the terms and conditions more than once after the competition started and then started offering free entries to new players and not old players and then didn’t even give the house away! the advertising standards authority already found them to be in breach of code and called it “unfair” – now we need the Gambling Commission to do something! only £173k prize which is nice but not really a £650k house right?! and the house belonged to the owner of Raffle House, Benno Spencer so he could have easily given it as a prize. they sent emails saying they only needed 6500 more “entries” to give the house away which I think was a lie anyway but then they say an entry is like 8 tickets or something so actually they pretty much knew they wouldn’t give the house away for a long time before the draw and they were selling tickets making people believe they might win a house right up until the day before the competition closed. this is downright fraud!! i’ve found a newspaper article on thisismoney.co.uk where they confirm they only sold 80,925 tickets out of 120,000 to give the house away and it took them more than a year to sell that many (only a bit more than half what was needed) so they knew almost for sure that no one would win the house while they were sending a million emails and putting up adverts right up until the day before the draw saying you could win a house! when in fact they took HALF the ticket sales money as “to get up and running”. if this isn’t scamming I don’t know what is!! it must be illegal!
Entries totalling £737,000 and a prize of £110,070 was awarded??? Yet another way of duping the vendor so a company can make a killing.
All these gimmicks dont work, if your house isnt selling the normal way then it is over priced!