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Loquax Competitions Update - March 2025

Start date 10th March 2025
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After the excruciatingly long 35 weeks of January we're now flying through 2025 already and with all that's going on in the world comping should be a welcome distraction. Although perhaps not as much for us as it is for you. In fact the last few weeks have been a hectic round of reading and emails thanks to the "raffles" or pay to enter competitions sector. Like any industry there seems to be a bunch of good guys trying to make it work whilst at the other it's the bad guys looking to make a fast buck. We'll come to that shortly but a bit of Loquax news. If you're one of the regular five or six who read the blog then you might have noticed we made a few tweaks in the layout across the main blog and category pages. This is stage one of a two step process as shortly the blog will be integrated into the forum system in roughly the same look and layout. The transition also means is that comments and discussion will be through the forum as opposed to the Facebook plugin that we have at the moment. This change we hope will help boost comments on the blog posts and also boost discussion points as well. Anyway that's coming very soon but in the mean time here's this month's Loquax Update.

Win Glastonbury Tickets With Brothers Cider

Glastonbury have just announced the line-up for the 2025 Festival which is expected to be the last one before the farm takes it's regular 12 months break in order to let the land recover. Headlining the event this year are The1975, Olivia Rodrigo and Neil Diamond. Rod Stewart is taking the Legends slot on Sunday. If you've not got tickets for the festival but you're hoping to go then you might like the chance to win some! And the good news is that Brothers Cider are back with their annual Glastonbury Tickets competition although you do need to make a purchase. For the chance to win tickets you need to enter the 8-digit unique code found underneath the ring pull to see if you've been lucky. This is a winning moment draw so it's all in the lap of the algorithms. There are 305 prizes to be won including 5 sets of Glastonbury Festival Tickets plus Brothers Cool Bags, Cases of Brothers Cider, Brothers Bucket Hats and Brothers Water Bottles. The prize draw ends on the 31st May and any unclaimed prizes left after this date will then be awarded via a mop-up draw - presumably from all entries - a few days later. Only one entry per unique code and you'll need to retain packaging and receipt in the event of a prize win. For more chances to win Glastonbury Tickets or any other music festival tickets then keep an eye on our Festival Prize Section.

Win A Golden Girder With Irn Bru

There are a lot of purchase necessary competitions around at the moment. Remember no purchase is needed to see our purchase necessary listings and you can filter things by date added, closing date, brand and prize type. In addition we have filters so you can find competitions specific to Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury's etc. One particular competition that has caught our eye since the last update is the latest promotion from Irn Bru. They're offering you the chance to win an 18 Carat Gold Girder that's worth £10,000. What was especially notable about this particular competition was that when it was first announced back in February, Brew Dog posted on X "double check your ts&c". The reason for this is because when Brewdog ran a Golden Can competition they ran into a few issues. In the original competition winners thought they were winning a 24 carat solid gold not a gold plated can worth £500. Anyway Brewdog made good on their mistake but they're probably still a tad sore about it. Anyway Irn Bru only have four Golden Girders to be won (one every two weeks) and they're worth £10,000 each. The closing date for this competition is the 29th April 2025.

Competitions Listing Icons Update

Next to every competition listing you will see a little square icon indicating the competition type. For example if it's a purchase necessary, Facebook, Gleam or postal entry. It's pretty straightforward. However when we updated the forum system we had an issue or two with respect to postal competitions that could also be entered via Text or Phone. In theory those listings should appear under Postcard Entry and Phone/Text Entry. Annoyingly they didn't until now! We've fixed the issue and also improved the icons. So from the above we can see that The Daily Mail comp is phone and text, ITV's £250,000 comp can be entered via text, phone and postal (it can also be entered online and the link is provided) and the Tesco competition is just Text to Win. The text under the competitions has also been updated plus we've now changed everything from "SMS" to "Text" just because it seems to be more appropriate.

Are GoodLife+ Changing Tack

GoodLife Plus (or GoodLife+) are a prize draw site that is probably well known by most compers these days. They offer users the chance to win prizes via a subscription model. For £11.99 a month you get various benefits including discounts and prize draw entries. Prizes range from cash through to cars. However are they starting to evolve the brand or perhaps even change tack? We ask this because they're not showing Instant Win prize draws. They're pay to enter and there are a limited number of tickets. Yes it looks like GoodLife+ are dipping a toe in the "raffles" sector. These draws also aren't - as far as we can tell - part of the subscription model which kind of makes us wonder whether this is the start of a transition. Winmore, who set themselves up in a similar way to GoodLife+, have also switched to the pay to enter model although they still offer subscriptions. Staying with GoodLife+ we're not overly impressed with them. We've noted that they run a lot of free prize draws on social media. Yet when they makes they never ever include a closing date and we can't seem to see any winners. We've replied to their posts a few times on X but had no response which makes us think they're doing social media but have zero interest in engagement. It begs the question are they actually giving away these prizes? We'd love to hear from anyone who has won with GoodLife+ on social media!

Write A 1* Review To Enter A Prize Draw?

Trustpilot is a review site that is popular with competition sites. Customers can leave their comments and views on a site or service and leave a rating of between 1 and 5 stars. You might remember we had our own fun with it last year. Whilst researching we stumbled across Palladium Competitions who for some reason seemed to have a lot of 1* ratings. In fact 26% of their total reviews are 1/5 so what's going on? Well for some reason it seems like the owners of Palladium Competitions offered their users the chance to win £500 if they left 1* reviews. Reading the reviews it's obvious which ones are specific to the prize draw because they say things like "how awful is this group offering a £500 prize for people to leave a one star review, how mad is that??". The site does have a whole bunch of 5* reviews but when it comes to these kind of sites they need to be taken with a pinch of salt as they're often requested. Having only heard about Palladium Competitions this week the prize draw TP reviews perhaps didn't paint the best picture. To be fair it's a bold strategy and it is one that does help dilute other 1* reviews. Looking through them suggests that there are question marks about winners, spam, and all the usual stuff about not winning that every competition site gets. We know that because we delved deeper but a potential customer looking through Trustpilot and comparing raffle sites might not do that. Instead they may simply think a site with that many bad reviews means it's one to stay well away from. Maybe Palladium Competitions might want to stump up for another prize draw but for 5* reviews?

Raffle Sites - Red Flags Are Flying

Blogging about raffle sites and some of the issues that we've encountered has started, perhaps unsurprisingly, to get us noticed. And being noticed means we learn about more sites who's activities appear to be questionable. For example one site we were alerted to has a series of pay to enter prize draws including a brand new home worth up to £350,000. On 5th March we checked in on the site and observed they'd sold 32 x 99p tickets for an iPhone 16 and 25 x £3.75 tickets for £1000. Those ticket sales are well off breaking even but today those competitions have completed, winners have been named and the site is back giving away several cash prizes and an Apple Watch. Their house competition sold 0 tickets for a few days before jumping nearly 900 today alone. The red flags are flying and so we've contacted the site to see what's occurring. Similarly we contacted another site who's just launched but apparently can afford to giveaway holidays and a £70K Bentley (and since we wrote this part of the blog that competition has quietly been dropped)! These sites sadly will carry on unchecked because they're unregulated and there's not many outlets for players to complain. There is Trustpilot and various Facebook groups where players can complain, and as we've seen above, Trustpilot can be fudged around with if you offer a prize. If a free prize draw is an issue then ASA is usually the best approach but for pay to enter sites a slap on the wrist for running a bad competition isn't enough. The problem for the sector is that the bad guys erode trust and transparency from the good guys. In truth we now view every single raffle site with a cautionary eye. But just being concerned doesn't actually get anyone anywhere.

Complaining About Raffle Sites & Blocking Them

Without any official body to flag concerns to we've started talking to payment gateways and platforms such as Zap and Reffle to see what they do with sites which we think aren't playing fair. You can read more on our Transparency post. In short if business owners know that their activies can be curtailed with the loss of payments or software then that may act as an incentive to be honest. Platforms and payment sites don't want to be associated with scammers as it effects the sector and other clients. If customers have doubts over integrity then everyone loses. A good example of this is the fallout over the recent closure of Jackson Jackpot. There are a lot of upset customers there and a lot of questions to be answered. Some may never get answered. What is worrying is that people spent a lot of money on that site and it's fair to extrapolate that to the many other sites that run these kind of competitions. Many gambling tools such as Gamstop, Gamcare, Gamban and Betblocker don't cover competition sites so we've been in touch with these services to see if they can expand their reach to pay to enter competition sites. If they're able to help then it'll be a huge step for the sector and hopefully help people who are spending way too much without the checks and balances offered by gambling sites. We'll keep you updated if and when we get further with this line of enquiry.

Paddy Power To Pay £1m To Winner

Talking of scams and gambling it was nice to see that Paddy Power have been orded to pay out a £1million jackpot by The High Court. Back in October 2020, Corrine Durber from Gloucestershire was playing on Paddy Power when she saw a message saying she'd won The Monster Jackpot of £1,097,132.71. However Paddy Power claimed that they'd be an error and in fact she'd only won The Daily Jackpot of £20,265.14. Mrs Durbar thankfully didn't take this lying down and sued the company for the rest of her winnings. This week The High Court agreed she should be paid out and granted summary judgement in her favour. Paddy Power told Sky News that they "deeply regret this unfortunate case and are reviewing the judgment". Hopefully Mrs Durbar will receive her winnings and that'll be the end of proceedings. We're not big fans of Paddy Power (long affiliate related story) so seeing them losing this case and now owing £980,000 to Mrs Dunbar brought a little smile to our faces.