Anyone have any info on this - my wife has received a letter inviting her to call because she has 'definitely been selected to receive one of the awards". The minimum ones being £250 Premium Bonds, £1,000 gift Voucher (from their catalogue)
Any idea what the catch may be?
It is a scam. It is always a scam! At some point you will have to send money or phone premium rate number for a long time.
Peter Crosland snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.co.uk
I agree with the principle - however - it says a 6 minute call at £1:50 per min - or apply by post with SAE
The phone call will cost you 6.48 minutes (2 second short of rounding to 7 minutes) * £1.50 = £ 9.725 ; so to break even on being honest scammers, they need 103 respondents per run of the scam to cover the big prize. Total prize funds are in the order of 5 times the headline prize value (guesstimating from what I heard of the Wimbledon prize money, but I sat down and totted this up for a particularly detailed scam a few years ago ; it's something of that order), so they'd need around 500 responders to cover their costs. Assume a 1% response rate ... that would imply 50,000 letters posted. Another few thousand quid on printing and postage then. Better make it a hundred thousand letters per run of the scam, to cover for the costs of setting up the phone lines, buying the address lists. That's a medium-sized direct mailing campaign. Not even a big one. And that's being an honest scammer. Most likely they're thieves, looking for the gullible. But they could make a profit on it even without being dishonest. The important question is - is the paper soft and strong enough to not let your fingers poke through it, and would you have difficulty explaining the ink marks on your bum?
You have misread the prize list and they are not the minimum cost ones to them. Look for the magic words "holiday vouchers" as that's in most of them. Maybe the £1000 vouchers have a minimum spend of £10,000?
Or the prices in their catalogue are grossly inflated for tat you wouldn't want anyway
Owain
Thanks all - I have now convinced my wife to shred the letter.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "John" saying something like:
It's a scam, it's always a scam.
I sat in a queue for a free TV once. DFor tree hours. Then some people came out 'did you get your free TV? ' No, you get that if you sign up for their timeshare'
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