This £54-a-month subscription is an absolute lottery
Ms J.D. writes: I read your recent article about Your Lotto Service UK Limited. When you add up the figures, you will see that this company will make thousands of pounds from its customers. It is charging me £54 a month, yet in one lottery I am just one of 500 people who will share the tickets. At 82 years of age I may be a bit gullible but I am so glad I read your report. THE Mail on Sunday’s investigation in June raised more questions than the company could – or would – answer. Your Lotto Service is a German- run company that sells membership of lottery syndicates, but without telling customers in advance just what they will get for their subscription.
It says: ‘We may determine that syndicates may involve different numbers of members.’
Those syndicates also involve different numbers of tickets from one draw to the next, making it even harder to see just how much bang you get for your buck.
The even bigger question is whether Camelot might refuse to pay out winnings. As I warned in June, Camelot told me: ‘Under the rules governing National Lottery games, Camelot is not liable to pay out on a ticket that it knows or suspects has been resold or otherwise transferred by way of trade.’
In short, workplace syndicates are absolutely fine. Commercial syndicates run as a business are not fine, Camelot says.
You sent me details of what you got for your one-month subscription of £54. You were put into four syndicates – one with 20 subscribers, one with 100, one with 350 and the fourth with 500. Those syndicates respectively held five tickets, ten tickets, 25 tickets and 100 tickets.
Your Lotto Service does not actually say whether it has bought tickets with identical lottery numbers for every draw in that month. But even if you assume you are entered in every draw, the tickets cost far less than the £54 you paid.
For example, 100 tickets would cost £200, so shared between 500 people in that syndicate, you would get the equivalent of one fifth of a ticket, valued at 40p.
Let us suppose there are eight draws that month and you are in all of them, that is still just £3.20 in real value that you have received. Making the same assumptions about the other syndicates and taking into account that Euromillions costs slightly more than the National Lottery, I reckon you have got less than £11 in value for your £54.
I put this to the boss of Your Lotto Service. She is a German named Sandra Poepping, who lives in Germany, where her company is based. She replied: ‘Thank you for your email, which I am considering with my team.’
She added: ‘I intend to come back to you in the course of tomorrow with my response.’
I have not heard from her since. What did arrive was a letter from her lawyer, Mishcon de Reya, failing to explain the real value of syndicate entries. They claimed that my original warning alleged that Your Lotto Service was unlawful and fraudulent, and that this was false and defamatory.
They demanded that these allegations be taken down from The Mail on Sunday’s websites, failing which their client would consider suing for damages.
They insisted there was no need to publish your letter or indeed a nyt hi ng e l s e t hat might be ‘misunderstood’ about Your Lotto Service.
The lawyers quoted the Gambling Commission as saying that commercial syndicates were not illegal. Yet my warning had never even mentioned the Gambling Commission – just the rules under which the National Lottery is operated by Camelot.
Mishcon de Reya added that Your Lotto Service had now contacted you and offered reassurance, so you had agreed to carry on subscribing your £54 a month. That, of course, is completely up to you. If you now believe you are getting value for money, that’s fine. Others may disagree.
Mishcon de Reya were repeatedly invited to put a value on the lottery entries you received for your £54. They declined, claiming that such a calculation would be futile because it is not possible to buy a fraction of a lottery ticket.
Intriguingly, the lawyers also claimed that because you and other syndicate members did not receive the actual tickets, Camelot could not suggest they had been resold on a commercial basis. In short, while tickets had not been sold, somehow any prizes attached to them had been. So, a final word from Camelot, which unlike Your Lotto Service actually runs the National Lottery and makes the rules.
It has never needed to take anyone to court to test its ban on reselling tickets, it told me. But crucially it explained: ‘ Our view is that although no physical tickets are changing hands, given that the company is charging customers for entry (and is retaining a significant percentage for itself), the only reasonable conclusion is that the share in the tickets (albeit virtually) is being t ransferred by way of trade.’
Under Camelot’s rules, that can be enough to allow it to refuse to pay winnings.