How to get the MSE £50 Hargreaves Lansdown Offer?

ZeroSum

I guess I'll find out in September. 
Then make a misselling complaint if I don't get it

Wilts73

I have another similar experience to others on this thread who did not get the offer despite being accepted via the MSE link.

In a message, Hargreaves Landsdown told me: 'This offer was only available for the first 1000 applicants who opened a new Stocks & Shares ISA using the link. We received the update for qualifying applications on Friday the 26th July 2024 and sent emails to those who qualified. If you have not received this email then I'm afraid you will not have qualified for the offer.'

My question is why did the link remain active if the 1000 applicant limit had already been reached?

I feel I have been missold and have asked them to close my account and give me my £100 back.

sparky0138

I enquired and received the following response:

We are still in the process of drawing up a comprehensive list of new clients who has qualified for the cashback offer.

We have however, made contact with all clients who have qualified via email.

We politely request to check your emails and spam/junk folder.

We hope to have a list of all qualified clients as soon as possible.

As I haven't received an e-mail I can't have qualified. I think I'll close it and put the money elsewhere.

masonic

This seems to be a great case study for how not to run a promotion...

1) Fail to mention there is a limit on the number of customers who can benefit from the offer.

2) Give the customer no feedback regarding the promotion during sign up.

3) Continue to accept sign ups through the promotional channel after the offer has closed.

4) Wait a few days before letting qualifying customers know that they have qualified, while failing to communicate with those who missed out.

5) Claim to have contacted all qualifying customers while simultaneously being unable to confirm whether or not a customer qualified.

Alexland

sparky0138 said:

We are still in the process of drawing up a comprehensive list of new clients who has qualified for the cashback offer.

We have however, made contact with all clients who have qualified via email.

Sounds like HL haven't got a clue who qualified for the offer. MSE should really insist that any promoted offer with a signup limit is clear to the consumer if they have qualified or not as part of signup before committing to the product.

ZeroSum

masonic said:

This seems to be a great case study for how not to run a promotion...

1) Fail to mention there is a limit on the number of customers who can benefit from the offer.

2) Give the customer no feedback regarding the promotion during sign up.

3) Continue to accept sign ups through the promotional channel after the offer has closed.

4) Wait a few days before letting qualifying customers know that they have qualified, while failing to communicate with those who missed out.

5) Claim to have contacted all qualifying customers while simultaneously being unable to confirm whether or not a customer qualified.

They did say there was a limit, however the problem was that they didn't withdraw the offer once it hit its limit. Allowing people to invest under the impression they were getting the bonus. (Your ponit 3)That's completely misselling & regulators should come down hard on them IMHO.

masonic

ZeroSum said:

masonic said:

This seems to be a great case study for how not to run a promotion...

1) Fail to mention there is a limit on the number of customers who can benefit from the offer.

2) Give the customer no feedback regarding the promotion during sign up.

3) Continue to accept sign ups through the promotional channel after the offer has closed.

4) Wait a few days before letting qualifying customers know that they have qualified, while failing to communicate with those who missed out.

5) Claim to have contacted all qualifying customers while simultaneously being unable to confirm whether or not a customer qualified.

They did say there was a limit, however the problem was that they didn't withdraw the offer once it hit its limit. Allowing people to invest under the impression they were getting the bonus. (Your ponit 3)That's completely misselling & regulators should come down hard on them IMHO.

Interesting, as others have suggested there was no mention of the limit to the number of customers who could benefit. Looking into this a bit more, the only information that was posted in the weekly email was:

The offer was also promoted on Twitter and in the local media outlets, again without mention of the limit, but referring to the main site article for full info. Clicking through to the Stocks & shares ISAs page, there is an affiliate link through to HL, but no mention of the offer. In fact the placeholder targeted by the link in the weekly email was itself removed from the article, so the article just loads as normal, so anyone not hovering over the link to see the #cashback stuck on the end of the hyperlink could reasonably think they'd just been sent to the article read information about S&S ISAs before signing up.

Perhaps there were originally details on that page about the offer and its limit that were subsequently removed. This removal seems to have taken place during Tuesday, while the weekly email was still being circulated.

It seems, without any mention of the offer and the fact it had expired, people clicked the link in the weekly email, scrolled down to the list of providers and then clicked through to HL using the affiliate link assuming they were signing up for this offer when in fact the affiliate link is just to benefit the site.

So I think the fatal error was in someone from MSE removing all traces of this offer from the main site article instead of leaving a notice that it had expired. This drove traffic to HL under false pretences. HL are blameless for this part. However, they've compounded the issue by not keeping track of who had signed up under the offer.

So the "them" in the statement about misselling and regulatory action would seem to be MSE rather than HL.

eskbanker

masonic said:

Interesting, as others have suggested there was no mention of the limit to the number of customers who could benefit. Looking into this a bit more, the only information that was posted in the weekly email was:

The offer was also promoted on Twitter and in the local media outlets, again without mention of the limit, but referring to the main site article for full info. Clicking through to the Stocks & shares ISAs page, there is an affiliate link through to HL, but no mention of the offer. In fact the placeholder targeted by the link in the weekly email was itself removed from the article, so the article just loads as normal, so anyone not hovering over the link to see the #cashback stuck on the end of the hyperlink could reasonably think they'd just been sent to the article read information about S&S ISAs before signing up.

Perhaps there were originally details on that page about the offer and its limit that were subsequently removed. This removal seems to have taken place during Tuesday, while the weekly email was still being circulated.

I believe that the email links to the #cashback tag within the main MSE S&S ISA article would have worked at the time the weekly email was sent out - there was a clear reference to the offer limit when the page was archived at 13:54 on Tuesday 23rd, and was still there at 11:40 on the Thursday, but had been removed by Tuesday 30th.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240723135438/https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/savings/stocks-shares-isas/#cashback

masonic

Oh yes, I'm possibly getting my weeks mixed up. So those who actually clicked the right link should have known there was a limit, and those claiming it wasn't stated were either mistaken or visited the page after it was finally removed.

eskbanker

masonic said:

Oh yes, I'm possibly getting my weeks mixed up. So those who actually clicked the right link should have known there was a limit, and those claiming it wasn't stated were either mistaken or visited the page after it was finally removed.

I suspect the issue was more at HL's end - it doesn't seem to be viable to work out from web archiving when they made it clear that the offer was fully subscribed, but it seems unlikely that they did so swiftly enough, or that this was fed back to MSE in adequate time to remove the offer there.

I still maintain (as do others no doubt) that MSE should have made it clear in the email that the offer was limited though, rather than just including the somewhat self-serving 'MSE Blagged' qualifier....