C.A.R Community Awards Register: Scam or not? You decide..

** Stop Press 10 Feb – Office of Fair Trading is seeking a court order against the company behind the Community Awards Register **

I guess that just about answers the question, don’t it?  Read on for the back story:

Scenario: Letter comes through addressed to you at your home address.  Oh, look, it seems you’ve won a  ‘Community Award’ – one of a range of tasty prizes.

All you have to do to claim your prize is call an expensive premium-rate phone number which (according to the paperwork) will cost you £9.00 plus your network charge for calling or texting that number.  Who knows how much that would be in addition?

I have a depressing feeling that this, like those moronic quizzes on daytime TV, is legal – so long as it delivers some prize to someone, somewhere.  After all, by calling a premium line number of your own free will, you’re clearly entering into the contract, right?  It’s just a form of ‘gaming’ isn’t it?

A quick bit of research leads me down a depressingly long rabbit hole.

Come with me on that jouney for a moment.

Click here to view map

The first thing we learn is that the company behind this is McIntyre & Dodd Marketing ltd whose postcode, incidentally, isn’t what they put on the mailout.

That postcode points to The Recycling People in Ross-on-Wye (right).

The correct postcode should of course be HR9 5PQ (according to an online business directory entry).  Sorry, no, it’s actually this field here, (according to the company’s own website).  Did I say there? I meant here (according to what looks like their own business entry in Google maps).  That’s a bit more like it.

Next we find that the Advertising Standards Authority ruled against this company in 2007.  What for? I hear you cry. Click the link and read for yourself.  Suffice it to say, in the words of the ASA, “The mailing breached CAP Code clause 7.1 (Truthfulness).”

Today, we discover that the OFT (Office of Fair Trading) is seeking a court order to stop McIntyre and Dodd Marketing Ltd stating:

‘Our case is that these promotions encourage people to believe they have won a valuable prize when, we argue, the plain fact of the matter is that people are being sold a low value product. We have been unable to reach agreement with the companies or secure voluntary agreement that distribution will cease. So we think the best thing now is for the High Court to decide the matter.’

McIntyre and Dodd Marketing Ltd are now part of a group of companies called DM Plc.  Scratch the surface of any of these companies and before long you’re looking at a whole end-to-end database building, direct marketing operation designed (clearly very successfully) to collect names, addresses and postcodes from people entering ‘quiz’ sites and ‘prize draws’ online.

And.. yes, you’ve guessed it! This data then pumps out the other end in the form of direct mail ‘prize draws’ – just like the one you received today. The funny part is that you almost certainly gave them permission in the first place.  The one thing these people aren’t is stupid enough to fall foul of the opt-in laws around direct marketing and database building, rest assured.

Here’s how DM Plc’s shares break down and here are most of the people who get the lion’s share of your money.  And this gives you just a tiny idea of how much of your money is involved in just one of the companies in the group.  Market capitalisation (value) of DM Plc is around £13.5 million – a substantial part of it, no doubt, gained from mailing ‘games of skill and chance’ to your door with premium rate phone numbers for you to call.  Take a closer look at Reuters entry for the company and bios of the top 5 people here.

So is the Community Awards Register a scam?  You, the Googling Great British Public – and now the High Court – will decide.

From an online reputation viewpoint, the fact that 500 people visited this post yesterday and today after being spontaneously and independently moved to type the words “community awards register scam” into Google is very revealing.

What would you have to do in your business to send people searching Google for your co. name plus the word ’scam’ at the end?  And would you even know if they were?

And perhaps strangest of all is this full page ad from the online New York Times paid notices section in 2008.  What in the world might be the link between that direct mail marketing company name and this one? Answers on a postcard… :-)

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