A few weeks ago we were emailed about a site called Life Made Competitions. Yes it’s another pay to enter prize draw site that requires you to spend some money for the chance to win various goodies such as cash, Apple Tech and even fragrances. They also have a win a house competition and we love win a house competitions. However the email wasn’t to tell us about how the prizes but that they had various concerns. These concerns included that despite limited promotion ticket sales performed quite well. Many competition sites have large social media followings and regularly post to maintain audience engagement. Life Made Competitions only have a Facebook page with around 5000 followers. Posts are sporadic and there’s little engagement. Another issue raised was that winners are picked by autodraw. What this means is that there are no live draws and pretty much everything automates itself. Competition sites need transparency and live draws are a good way to demonstrate this. We decided to take a look and that’s when we spotted the house competition. We like to think we – and our house compers – are on the ball with house competitions but this one has never been mentioned, yet Life Made were showing that they’d sold around 1800 tickets at £5 each! Now that’s feasible but experience tells us that this is one to keep an eye on.
Who Are Life Made Competitions?
Life Made Competitions is owned by Life Made Competitions Ltd, a company incorportated in May 2023. They’re based in Alfreton and the company owned by Damon Bullock and Davina Dunlea. Their social media presence is only on Facebook which currently has 5.4K likes and 5.5K followers. There’s little detail on Facebook about them. Unusually for these kind of sites they do have a responsible play page and players can apparently pause accounts, limit spending and close their accounts. Fromwhat we can tell they’re running competitions using WordPress with the Woocommerce Lottery plugin. This is quite standard for competition sites. In terms of prizes and competitions they seem to run several promotions that run from midday Thursdays and last for one week. Prizes include £100 Site Credit, £1000 Jackpot, £3000 Jackpot, £500 Jackpot, £100 Vouchers, Apple Watch Series 10, £1500 Jackpot, Tom Ford Fragrance and A Home Up To £350,000. Ticket prices range from 25p up to £5 although there’s usually one free to enter giveaway each week. As mentioned above the competitions are autodrawn, which means that as soon as the giveaway closes the winners page is updated. Winners are named and they stem back to March 2024. However there are no pictures of winners with their prizes. There are a couple of posts on Facebook where winners have asked about their prizes. Reviews on Trustpilot also suggest a few winners.
Ticket Sales At Life Made Competitions
We had been looking at the site previously and what seems odd is that the site is dishing out prizes worth several thousand pounds but ticket sales just don’t look as though they come close to covering them. Now it’s not unusual for a competition site to occasionally make a loss on a prize draw. But on every draw and every week looks to be bad business management. Knowing that Life Made Competitions run their promotions from Thursday to Thursday we decided to keep an eye on how things progress with respect to ticket sales over seven days (6th March to 13th March). What we found was quite interesting.
The above was taken 2.10pm on the 6th March. As you can see each of the competitions have recorded sales quite early on.
The following morning, 9am on the 7th March, we can see that each of the draws has accumulated a handful of entries. Now this seems kind of normal. Although it’s strange that in the first throes of each draw there was a lot of sales then just a few.
Now nothing changed until the 10th March when the £100 site credit competition has increased by just 2 ticket sales. These numbers are the same on the 11th March.
Around 10.20am on the 12th March two of the draws have had no sales, but the £100 Site Credit has again increased slightly. At this point you might be thinking there’s not a lot to get excited about.
By 8pm on the 12th March however the numbers start to jump. The Site Credit goes up by 45, The £1000 Jackpot increases by 80 and the £3K Cash by a massive 218 sales. We record exactly the same numbers at 9.11am on the 13th March with just a few hours left for the draw to run.
As we know the competitions are due to close at midday we started checking the sales more regularly during the final hour. At 11.23am the first competition has 7 extra sales, but nothing for the other two.
The above was taken at 11.45am and we see increases of 42 tickets and 81 tickets respectively for the other two competitions. The above numbers are the final scores for each draw.
Free Entry Competition
Now the above shows just three of the 9 competitions that were running between the 6th and 13th March. But the same thing occurs with the others. The £500 Jackpot, £100 Free Entry and Apple Watch competitions started with 9, 2 and 8 sales respectively. By the morning of the 7th these were 10, 11 and 8. Come the 10th March only the free entry competition had increased this time to 20. By the 11th March the free entry level jumped to 91 and this tallies with the competition being posted on MSE. We know it wasn’t on Loquax as we’d implented a block on Life Made. At 10.24am on the 12th again only the free entry competition has increased but by the evening our numbers are 78, 116 and 93. Two competitions with 0 sales for a few days suddenly jump. At 11.50am on the 13th just 10 minutes before closure the numbers are 118, 129 and 133 which is fine until you compare it with 11.23am when the numbers were 78, 127 and 93 then again at 11.45am when it became 118, 129 and 93. Two competitions with poor sales over nearly a week both jumping up 40 sales in a matter of minutes but not parallel in time.
Win A House Ticket Sales
So that’s six competitions – what about the other three including that win a house competition. On the 6th March 2025 around 2pm the numbers were as follows for Bullseye £1500, Tom Ford Fragrance and Win A House: 27, 5 and 2866. The win a house figure had jumped by nearly 1000 from the first time we’d seen it and those jumps were big jumps rather than incremental changes. On the morning of 7th March the numbers were 27, 6 and 2871. These numbers were the same at midday on the 10th, 1pm on the 11th and 10.24am on the 12th. However on the evening of the 12th the numbers jumped to 154, 27 and 3260. Almost 800 tickets sold at £5 each in the space of 8 hours after a few days of nothing on the house competition. At 11.23am on March 13th the sales are 156, 27 and 3265. Small jumps suggest that there are players purchasing tickets either with cash or maybe site credit. The numbers remain the same at 11.45am but at 11.50am things get interesting.
This was taken at 11.50 and 29 seconds. Note the numbers are 156, 27 and 3265.
This was taken 23 seconds later. We’d noticed that the numbers on other competitions were systematically increasing one at a time. Apparently in just under 30 seconds 59 tickets were added to the Bullseye Competition.
And then a couple of minutes later the Tom Ford competition attracts a final 8 sales. We don’t know about you but that looks pretty odd. Firstly we’re seeing a lot of sales at the start of these promotions, then things go quiet with one or two small rises. However we then see a big jump on the evening before the closing date with each competition increasing almost in turn as the clock ticks down.
But Did People Win?
Winners have been drawn for the eight competitions that closed and these have been published on Life Made. There is a possibility that all the above just coincendentally looks like issues we’ve seen before when sites are fudging their figures, but something doesn’t add up. The site is given away £1000s of prizes and has done so since March 2024. The income for the ticket sales, assuming our maths is right, is £18 for Site Credit, £537.20 for £1000, £657.40 for £3000, £348.10 for the £500, £131.67 for the Apple Watch, £376.25 for £1500 and £34.65 for the Tom Ford. You don’t need to be an accountant to understand that you’re not making money with those figures. Extrapolate similar losses over previous weeks and that’s a huge loss. It just doesn’t make sense. As part of our investigation we contacted Cashflows.com who are responsible for the payment gateaway of Life Made. Payment gateways should know every payment being made through a competition site and so in our view if anything untoward is occurring then they can take appropriate action such as closing the gateway – essentially closing the site’s ability to take cash. Cashflows say that they’re investigating our concerns but considering what we told them we’re surprised that they’ve not been able to comment one way or the other. If there were plenty of sales then it surely would be a simple “yes everything is fine” in reply?
So What’s The Conclusion?
Before writing this blog we tried to contact Life Made Competitions via their website and ask them about their competitions and why their ticket sales jumped as they did. We couldn’t see any advertising or social media posts and traffic levels look minimal (SEMRush). The only thing that tallies with the numbers is the increase in free entries coinciding with a listing on MSE. The rest just seems a little strange. They didn’t reply! On the face of it the number changes and activity do look questionable. In theory ticket sales should be in dribs and drabs across the site throughout the promotion not spikes on individual comps, especially as those seen towards the end. Of course there may be nothing untoward going on here – we have to hope that and this blog is simply outlining what we have seen over the last week. But if everything is real then the losses this site is potentially incurring is insane and perhaps if nothing else it might make Life Made review their income and outgoing. It’s not looking like a viable business. At time of writing a whole series of new competitions had just launched – it’ll be interesting to see just how they progress over the next week.