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Duty charges on competition prize

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Hello!

I was lucky enough to win (well, runner up) a photography competition back in Aug/Sep. The prizes only recently appeared around the 10th December in a big box from FedEx - and (this sounds ungrateful) not all of the listed prizes were included. Nevermind! I thought, it was nice to win, let alone get any prize!

Then on Christmas Eve I got an envelope from FedEx, inside was an invoice for the duty charges of £73.20 plus £10 admin fees! :confused:

I've no idea how to Google this for advice, I've emailed the US based company that ran the worldwide competition (it was international, with the winner/runners up from all areas of the world) asking for clarification about this - but where do I stand? If it's a prize, I assumed that would be like a gift and so not liable to me... but from a few browses of the net I note that others sending christmas gifts to family can end up with the recipient getting charged. I'm just baffled as to where I stand in all this. One of the prizes is a $100 gift card... which I was pretty much dismissing as whatever I buy would be liable for postage costs and its own duty charges which meant it wouldn't really make it anything other than just buying from the UK (well, I've not really checked but hey ho... assuming!)

Other browses have shown that other competitions mention in their T&C that the recipient is liable for any duty, there were no T&C like this with the photo comp other than about rights for the winning photo use.

Halp! I'm now looking at selling my prizes to cover the cost of receiving them :rolleyes:
:rotfl:

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