Mr Motivator ‘hurt’ by scam slur over raffle of Jamaican resort
TELEVISION fitness guru Mr Motivator had to abandon his plans to raffle his £2million Jamaican tourism resort after being falsely accused of trying to defraud entrants.
Derrick Evans, who has returned to TV as Mr Motivator in recent weeks, says the experience in his Caribbean homeland left him hurt.
The allegations emerged when Mr Evans tried to raffle the property because he wanted to return to Britain to care for his sick daughter Abigail.
“This guy set up a website saying it was a scam,” said Mr Evans, 67, who has been trying to keep Britain active with his live televised workouts during the coronavirus lockdown.
“He said, ‘Look, he’s short of money and he’s trying to get people’s money.’ 60,000 people saw that and when you have something like that on a site, it spreads like wildfire.”
Located in the hills of north Jamaica, the resort has a six-bedroom house, a small apartment block, a cottage, zipwire course and paintball zone.
Mr Evans said he raffled it rather than tried to sell the resort to give an “ordinary person” the chance to own it.
Launched in Oct 2018, the raffle was meant to conclude with a draw last January but the deadline was extended until the end of August. Golden Ticket Online, the organiser, said at the time that this was due to “overwhelming requests for an extension”.
But Mr Evans told The Daily Telegraph that only 1,200 tickets had been sold by the time the decision was taken to abandon the competition.
“We had to cancel it because it wasn’t selling,” he said. “We gave back every single person their money.
“Everyone was written to. I said, ‘Look, how can it be a scam? Here’s my face.’ I refunded everyone and said the lottery can’t go ahead.”
Mr Evans was born in Jamaica but moved to Leicester as a child before finding fame in the early Nineties on GMTV. He divides his time between Jamaica and Manchester, where he lives with wife Sandra and Abigail, who has Type 1 diabetes.
“It hurt me. I was doing something I thought would give an ordinary person a chance to own something … a step in the right direction,” he said.