Are UK prize-competition draws fair?

FairDraw checks what competition sites publish about their own draws, and publishes what the numbers show. Every check uses public data, a method anyone can rerun, and gives the operator the chance to respond before and after publication.

The idea

Most UK competition sites publish, for every finished competition, how many tickets were sold, the maximum number of tickets, and the winning ticket number. That is enough to test whether the draw behaves like a random pick over the tickets sold. A fair draw puts the winning ticket anywhere in the range with equal chance; a draw that only ever looks at part of the entries leaves a pattern. The method page explains the test and how to run it on any site in an afternoon.

Audits

For operators

Bots and syndicate buying are the industry's complaint of the moment. Our data says the problem is mostly mathematical, not technical: sites publish the exact numbers that make a buyout profitable, then watch the same few people take it. What stops it is a change to how prizes are released and how late buying is capped, plus a scoring method that spots syndicate accounts from their own purchase timing.

What this site is not

We do not say why a result looks the way it does. A draw that favours early tickets can be a software defect as easily as a choice, and only the operator can tell which. We publish the data, the test, the probability, and the operator's answer. See about and disclosure for who runs this, what else they do in this industry, and how corrections work.