E: 30/06 Win a magnum pleasure card

evelyn192

Thanks, I will post my stick off anyway, I didnt get an email confirming it had gone in so it seemed to me that it hadnt, although on 2nd attempt it said already registered.

purplebutterfly

Compliance.Org wrote: »

I've written a formal letter to Birds Eye with regard to the cheating issue and also phoned them. They have promised to investigate big winners before despatching any money. From mail I have received it seems the two biggest winners are a Carolyn ???? from the London area and a Neil ???? from Grimsby, Lincs. Surnames deleted as per the Data Protection Act. It's my understanding that both have won around 450 cards. This amount would seem to be excessive though no suggestion of cheating is implied. What I would say is Bird's Eye should have terms and conditions in place to prevent this monopolising of prizes. It would seem plain that these two individuals have cleared stores of flashed packs, presumably numerous times. If a participant won shall we say once every half dozen goes, that would mean 2,700 Magnum have been bought by each of them. I would suggest a 1 in 6 win rate is probably not acheivable. Therefore it's likely they have bought 4,000 - 5,000 Magnums each.

Is that fair? Is it in the spirit of the competition? I leave you to judge but I have let Bird's Eye know my feelings in no uncertain terms. Competitions like this should be available and present an equal opportunity to all customers. Not be a private piggy bank for the avericious who have more money than they clearly need and still wish to add to it.

Personally, I think it is absolutely disgusting that this level of pure greed is allowed. It is NOT in the spirit of the competition for people who have unlimited funds to prevent other people from entering competitions by cleaning out the stores of Magnums.

10 packs at a time is acceptable - 100 packets a time is vile greed.

Yes, I have made a profit on this competition but I have also eaten every bloody Magnum! I can only imagine that these people buying thousands have been binning the actual ice cream in order to get at the sticks. What a lovely world we live in where people are starving to death every minute and yet rich, greedy b*****rds are wasting luxury foodstuffs in order to increase their already sizeable bank balances.

orange_plastic

Compliance.Org wrote: »

I've written a formal letter to Birds Eye with regard to the cheating issue and also phoned them. They have promised to investigate big winners before despatching any money. From mail I have received it seems the two biggest winners are a Carolyn ???? from the London area and a Neil ???? from Grimsby, Lincs. Surnames deleted as per the Data Protection Act. It's my understanding that both have won around 450 cards. This amount would seem to be excessive though no suggestion of cheating is implied. What I would say is Bird's Eye should have terms and conditions in place to prevent this monopolising of prizes. It would seem plain that these two individuals have cleared stores of flashed packs, presumably numerous times. If a participant won shall we say once every half dozen goes, that would mean 2,700 Magnum have been bought by each of them. I would suggest a 1 in 6 win rate is probably not acheivable. Therefore it's likely they have bought 4,000 - 5,000 Magnums each.

Is that fair? Is it in the spirit of the competition? I leave you to judge but I have let Bird's Eye know my feelings in no uncertain terms. Competitions like this should be available and present an equal opportunity to all customers. Not be a private piggy bank for the avericious who have more money than they clearly need and still wish to add to it.

The rules on the wrappers and boxes differ from the rules on the website in that the wrappers and boxes say "one entry per e-mail address per draw" and the website says "one entry per ISP address per draw". Obvioously they mean IP address. I have a domain name so I receive mail to any email address at my domain, so in effect I have an endless supply of email addresses and could enter a single draw as many times as I could enter within one hour. I would think that with such a discrepancy in the rules a decision would rule in favour of the entrant.

I would like to assure everyone that I haven't entered any draw more than once, in fact I have only entered 70 draws (and struggled to pay for the Magnums to do it)!

If one spends £1000 on Magnums one gets approx. 2000 of them. There are 2184 draws in this promotion, so it is possible that whoever did so stayed well within the rules of the competition. Similarly 450 cards is quite attainable over 2184 draws. I am still getting about 1 win in 8 and I assume the number of entries has been increasing over the duration of the promotion. My first three entries each won £20, so I do not doubt a win rate of 1 in 6 over the three months.

I am not saying that I think it fair that a few people seem to have dominated the competition and been a bit greedy, I'm just playing Devil's Advocate because I think some people on this forum seem to want a witchhunt. We need to look at statistics rather than having kneejerk reactions. The average prize win is £20.50, so one would expect 450 wins to have an approximate value of £9225. The total prize fund is £1,119,300, so the combined winnings of these two represents about 1.6% of the total prize fund; not enough that they should be blamed for the lack of winnings that some people have been complaining about on this forum.

Had I realised earlier that this competition had a financial return of around 300-400%, I admit that I would have invested rather more than £40 in it. Actually more than 400% - I have had £140 return on the £22 of sticks that have been drawn upto this morning, so that's more like 600%... it's crazy!

kittycatty

I won £10 at the begining and then £20 at the begining of June, I have entered loads since then and not had any wems. My odds are 1 in 26.

evelyn192

It's no suprise to me that people have spent massive amounts, this always happens with these type of comps (Fanta, Nutrigrain to name a couple) as long as they have only entered 1 code an hour there's nothing anyone can do, its when they enter on behalf of family members in the same hour or use a load of sim cards for the same hour that they have the advantage and unless they can check to whom a sim is registered to, they cant be caught out.

orange_plastic

pineapple77 wrote: »

Yes I think that is fair there was nothing to say that you couldn't win that many times. These people are not the cheats, they at least bought the product
.
What is cheating is people guessing codes and entering and therefore we are all finding we are getting codes that say they are used.

As I calculated in an earlier post, with 32 possible characters (1-9 and A-Z without 'O') in 10 positions there are over 1,000,000,000,000,000 combinations and I estimate Magnum have released at most 500,000 codes. Hence if you take the first four (standard) characters of a code, the chances of guessing a valid code from the other six are around 1 in 2000. It would take long enough to try (on average) 2000 codes that one would be better off buying 6 valid ones from Asda at 50p each.

In other words, the more deternimed cheat who tried to guess codes wouldn't have managed to enter more than a handful before realising how stupid an exercise it would be.

orange_plastic

I've got about 40 Magnums without sticks in my freezer. I like Magnums. I'm going to eat them once I have recovered from my recent aversion to them caused by the other 30...

:-)

crazygal27

My odds were 2 in 12 so one in 6. However my local tesco ran out of magnums about 2 weeks ago, i'm now suffering withdrawl symptoms from eating them.

purplebutterfly

I agree with you, to some extent about a "witchhunt" - HOWEVER, I do 100% believe there has been an inordinate amount of cheating regarding the use of multiple emails/text numbers and that this should have been prevented by Magnum having a system in place. It has been made clear that people deliberately stock up on SIM cards in order to have numerous phone numbers to text from! Whilst technically within the rules, it can hardly be considered to be "fair and just".

I also believe that emptying shops of all their Magnum stocks in order to deprive others of a chance to even enter is utterly disgusting.

God forbid these people have children - what kind of society are we going to live in if cheating to attain your own ends is considered acceptable?

And before anyone says "well, some people are really struggling right now" - if you were struggling, you wouldn't have money to spend on ice cream. Not to mention the fact that most people are not exactly living the life of riley right now.

The worst part is that anybody who has been cheating and/or mass buying Magnums will not give a damn about the ethics or morality of it all. They will swan off and buy their new tellies or whatever and feel terribly smug that they won thousands of pounds by their own clever actions.

And do you know what? That is life. They won't "get their comeuppance" because life is not a happy, karmic ride. They will continue to use whatever means possible to get what they want.

It is up to the companies running these promotions to put safeguards in place to prevent this kind of thing being possible - because the milk of human kindness dried up many moons ago.

orange_plastic

I am more concerned that four of my entries last night got the error message an I was assured by Magnum today that they would be entered as usual, whilst others on this forum have been told they will receive new codes to replace theirs. Have I been lied to?