Competition winner but no prize

[Snowsquonk]

My daughter uses twitter, and instagram and follows several fashion sites and on-line retailers.

In October, she entered a competition on Instagram - basically share and promote an on-line retailer and stand a chance of winning a watch - well, she won! She was really please and promptly promoted the company again all over social media. Sent her address in and waited.

And waited

And waited

I chased (she's 16) on her behalf in December and was told by the retailer that the prize had just arrived in stock and would be sent out. Nothing. No emails, no prize.

I may have lost my rag a little a couple of weeks ago and used email, and posted on their Facebook page that I felt they'd taken the competition winners for a ride, letting them promote the retailer without ever having any intention of sending out a prize. Managing director (running company herself) got in touch, very sarcastic to start with - claiming prize sent on 5th Jan. Now, we ordered a shed-load of stuff online before Christmas and had no problem in getting everything delivered - I see my postie most days because I work from home - she insinuated it had been stolen, and would send another. That was a week ago, and we've still not had anything.

Would I be unreasonable to go public on social media? I do now think she's got no intention of honouring the prize winners and simply exploited people who promoted her shop all over social media.

[LurkingQuietly]

Do it! I think they've treated your DD terribly. Once you go public, I bet she'll get her prize!

[GokTwo]

What unpleasant, silly people. They of all people should know how powerful social media is. Yes, definitely tell all, what a dishonest way to behave!

[RandomNPC]

Go for it, on Twitter especially. Twitter is a very effective way to sort this kind of thing out. I'll retweet if i see it.

[FarFromAnyRoad]

The Money Saving Expert website has an excellent competitions forum where you'll get some really good advice about this. I know this because they helped me once with a similar problem. Try this before going Twitter-shit on them!

[babybat]

The Institute of Promotional Marketing are the industry watchdog and they can make sure competitions are run fairly - might be worth dropping them an email?

[DeWee]

Well things do go missing in the post. I'm at home most of the day and things do sometimes not arrive. And I'm not talking about valuables, things that just get lost. For example I had a film developped, back in the dark ages, which went missing in the post. 24 pictures badly taken of me and my friends playing tennis. Never turned up, but no one would have had use for it.

[Longdistance]

My db enters lots of competitions, and won loads. The people who didn't honour their prize was Men's Health magazine.

If I knew of the above from pp, we would have contacted them.

Btw, the prize was a watch, and he never received it, even though his name was published.

[arethereanyleftatall]

But if the competition wasn't kosher, wouldn't they just make up the name of the winner, rather than choosing a real person, who would if course chase them?