No card, no deposit, no fee to claim

Why free makes the game lawful, in one paragraph

Under the Gambling Act 2005 a lottery has two ingredients: people pay to enter, and prizes are allocated by chance. Take either one away and it is not a lottery. Our paid competitions remove the pure chance by requiring a genuine skill question and carrying a free postal route of equal standing. The free instant win removes the other ingredient instead, by not charging anybody anything.

That is why it has no skill question and no postal route either. As the free launch draw page puts it, a draw that is free for everyone needs neither, so we have not added a hurdle for the sake of appearances. It is also why a card field would be a problem rather than a convenience: payment is the thing whose absence makes the game what it is.

Worth saying plainly, because it is the obvious follow-up: a free game paying out cash is still not a lottery. What decides that is whether anybody pays to take part, not what the prize happens to be.

What we do ask for, and what each thing is for

Three items, and a reason for each. Nothing is collected because it might be useful later.

• An email address. The account needs an identity and a win needs somewhere to be confirmed to. Marketing email is a separate tick box that is not ticked for you and is never a condition of playing.
• A password. So the account, and anything it holds, belongs to you rather than to whoever has your email address.
• Your date of birth. The game is for over 18s and we check age at signup rather than waiting until somebody wins and then asking awkward questions.

What we never ask for

Shorter list, and more useful:

• Card details, at any stage. There is no payment step in the free game and no card field in the signup.
• A deposit, a balance to top up, or a minimum spend before a free play unlocks.
• A fee, tax or admin charge to release a prize. There is none, there never will be, and a request for one is the clearest possible sign that a message is not from us.
• Anything at all by phone. We do not ring winners to collect details.

The one exception, and which direction it runs in

There is cash in the ladder, up to £50, and cash has to be sent somewhere. So a cash winner is asked for bank details at the claim stage, and it would be sleight of hand to write a page called "no card needed" without saying so.

The distinction is the direction of travel. We ask where to send money to you. We never ask for anything that could take money from you: no card number, no fee, no payment, no deduction, at any stage. A free ticket prize does not even involve that much, because it is added to your account automatically with nothing asked of you.

The one thing to be careful about

It is not usually the promotion that catches people out, it is what arrives afterwards. An account posing as the promoter, a message saying you have won, and a small payment or a card number needed to release it. That pattern is old and it still works, because a real win makes a fake one plausible.

So the habit worth having is simple: a prize is claimed on the site you played on, by logging into the account you played with. Not through a link in a message, and never by sending anybody money. We will never ask a winner for a payment, and nothing we award needs one.