To think tv competitions are some kind of scam?

[causeimunderyourspell]

Having a rare day of watching daytime telly, was just watching This Morning who have a competition running this week to win £250k!

They have these kind of competitions weekly, as does Good Morning Britain and many other programmes. ITV seem to have the biggest ones cash and prize wise, but I have seen them on other channels as well.

Anyway, of all these competitions with a new one each week/few days, I'm thinking that's thousands upon thousands of competitions over the years! Yet I don't know of a single person that has won one? I don't even know anyone that knows someone who has!

Are these a complete con or have you/do you know anyone that has, won one?? I'm always so tempted to enter when I see one but can't help but wonder.

They aren't a scam, but each competition tends to run for quite a long time and the cost of the calls to enter means that the TV company is always the winner.

I enter competitions and am on various comping forums. There have been several winners over the years of the big amounts that ITV give away. Obviously I've never won them but keep entering (by post as that's the cheapest way to do it) in the hope that one day it'll be me. They are genuine competitions, they legally have to give away those prizes, otherwise they'd be prosecuted by the ASA.

That's interesting @sunshinewithabitofdrizzle, have you ever won anything else via comping websites like prizes or vouchers etc? I did briefly consider comping when I was on maternity but after only entering a few I was getting all sorts of dodgy emails and scam calls

I understand (though happy to be corrected) that they are well regulated so unlikely to be scams. They are just a lottery though and I strongly suspect if you had access to the figures (i.e. how many entries there are) you'd find they are a very poor bet mathematically. The fact that there are so many of them is, for me, sufficient evidence that they are highly profitable for the organisers and thus very poor value for the entrants.

@bridgetreilly the large ITV ones are new each week so that's 52 each year x who knows how many years they've been running comps! I'm really interested to see if we can find at least one person who knows someone who did

I know someone who won a family holiday to Australia from a coke can.

@wellBeehivedWoman wow!!!

Not a TV competition, but I won a 17 night all-inclusive Mediterranean cruise for two on a phone-in radio competition several years ago. I refused to believe it was real until we were actually on the ship. I'd never entered anything like it before, just thought I'd give it a go and got lucky!

My friends Dad won £10k on Loose Women a few years ago. He entered for free on the Internet.

@causeimunderyourspell I don’t enter competitions but noticed with interest on a week off work that they are not separate competitions but advertised weeks across all itv shows like Good Morning Britain, This Morning, Loose Women, etc. They give out a lot but not as often as you said.

Do the same rules apply to those online bingo sites as well? I've always thought that any game of this nature where you don't actually see the 'random' nature of the draw is going to be dodgy - they could give the 'prize' to a stooge, thereby fulfilling the nature of 'somebody winning', but there being no real 'prize' to win in the first place.

I could be wrong but I’m fairly certain that the GMB/Lorraine/this Morning/Loose women big competitions are all the same competition, they just each film their own separate promo for it.

Each competition also runs for quite a while, a few weeks - a month depending on the size of the prize.
But I think they film slightly different promos each week to make it appeal to new people and probably make it seem like it’s a new competition (in the hopes that people will enter again thinking it’s a nice read draw).

I know someone through work who won a car and a lot of tech things and some cash from the itv competition a year or two ago, so people do actually win.

The only ‘scam’ is that it costs £X per text/phone call to enter and they probably make twice as much as the prize costs from entry’s for each competition.

I used to be a comper like sunshine upthread, there were the occasional people who won the big telly comps on the forums. It’s no more a scam than the national lottery, how many people do you know who have won large amounts on that? The tv companies can’t afford the scandal of them not running these things totally above board.

What I sometimes wonder about is the legitimacy of all the online bingo and gaming sites. There are so many of them, some have big names behind them and again probably can’t afford scandal, but the smaller ones could be being run from some tax and extradition free haven with fake winners and rigged games.

Wouldn’t be surprising zaphod, itv and I think Channel 5 (and channel 4 Richard and Judy show IIRC?) all got fined for advertising cash prizes that turns out that was “won” by their own staff

I could be wrong but I’m fairly certain that the GMB/Lorraine/this Morning/Loose women big competitions are all the same competition, they just each film their own separate promo for it.

Each competition also runs for quite a while, a few weeks - a month depending on the size of the prize.
But I think they film slightly different promos each week to make it appeal to new people and probably make it seem like it’s a new competition (in the hopes that people will enter again thinking it’s a nice read draw).

You’re not wrong, this is what they do.

I stupidly thought that you had to be actually watching Andy on GMTV to enter the competition . It slowly dawned on me that not only were the competitions advertised on lots of other ITV programmes, but professional "compers" were entering too via information on MoneySavingExpert forums etc. When they show the winners they're always men called Brian from Northallerton.

Hang on - my OH lives near Northallerton! Wonder if he'd change his name to Brian,,,

I've won some nice prizes. I just banked a cheque today for £1k from one of the cheapy women's weekly magazines. I've only started comping again seriously since the end of last year, but when my dd was a baby and my exh had left me, I had no money and so comped to win things I needed or could sell. I won 2 trips to Paris (one from a Birds Eye online survey) and a holiday to Egypt (from a Sainsburys cereal packet), plus loads of electronics and stuff like that. In those days most competitions were entered by post and you had to do a tie-breaker slogan type thing. I used to go to meet-ups with other compers and swap entry forms etc. Now most competitions are just chance and entered online, which makes it much harder to win anything and there's no skill involved.

Someone in my family won a wedding from a radio competition