A couple of years back it’s safe to say that one aspect of comping really riled us – automated competition entry services. We pretty much led the way in making compers and promoters aware of this spam that was essentially ruining a lot of competitions. Our blog Automated Competition Entry IPs & Emails: Updated Help For Promoters provided comp organisers with much needed data and email addresses to watch out for. Changes at Loquax did mean that the focus on this topic faded away but sadly the problem hasn’t! This week we were contacted by a promoter who despite making it clear on their competition page that automated entries will be disqualified still received 2000 or so entries from an automated entry service. The bad news for those entries were that they were binned.
Win24 Still Going
The email addresses used included accounts from domains shortsmail.co.uk threemailnet.co.uk lonynet.org.uk stonetimenet.co.uk and drecom01.co.uk – all of which are on our watch list. These domains are registered to Travelresearch Ltd and hosted on IPHH in Hamburg. We know that means it’s our old friends at Win24. We’re not quite sure if they’ve been dormant for a while as their Facebook page has only just received it’s first update in almost a year. They claim that their latest winners have won a Ford Fiesta, £200 voucher, Playstation4 and 2 games and Solar DAB Radio. However as usual there’s no indicator regarding which competitions these were – we’d love to know how a promoter would feel handing over the keys to a new car to someone who couldn’t even fill in a form to enter a prize draw.
Prize Draw Centre Closes
On the plus side The Prize Draw Centre, remember them – they were the service picked up by the owners of Oxfordshire Press – well that’s no longer running. Unfortunately for them it would seem the other services had the monopoly on people happy to pay in pursuit of being disqualified. Anyway this blog is a reminder to compers and especially promoters to remain vigilant. If you check your competition entries it’s actually not too difficult to spot if you’ve been spammed and then remove them before selecting your winners.