Dafydd Bayliss – £18,000

After a couple hours of hunting and chasing … we found Dafydd Bayliss and resolved his nightmare.

He won a BMW M3 or £18,000 a couple months ago, however he never received his winnings and communications went quiet.

After seeing the BBC news article this morning two things went through my mind:

1) Why on earth is a company running competitions, taking people’s money and promising a prize … if they can’t pay out the win

2) If this isn’t resolved it will give a bad name to the industry as a whole which is mostly made up of genuine companies

I got in touch with the BBC, they rung me back and CC’d Dafydd into an email (BBC never stops … it’s Xmas Eve! Nice touch!)

I hunted him down on Facebook (and his mum) and messaged them both asking to speak to them.

After a couple hours of wondering if he’d think this was a scam or not … Dafydd rung me, we had a good chat and I confirmed that Rev Comps would step up and pay out his £18,000 as a goodwill gesture to show this industry isn’t completely full of scams and empty promises.

He’s just sent back this photo:

Faith restored!

£18,000 in his bank on Xmas Eve … he’s trying to buy a house so this worry is now resolved.

Merry Christmas Dafydd!

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This situation highlights a few problems with the competition industry as a whole.

Back when we started in 2019, there were a handful of competition sites.

Draws would be extended if all the tickets didn’t sell, live draws were literally someone pointing a phone at a laptop screen. It was a bit of a mess.

We came in and were the first to guarantee draw dates, regardless of ticket sell out. This then became the industry standard to which all competition sites now follow suit.

You can now play on 100s if not 1000s of sites in the UK, the majority of which do guarantee their draws, do payout to winners and all run transparent live or auto draws which in the past wasn’t the case.

It is very easy for anyone to set up a competition site these days.

Banks and payment providers willingly allow pretty much anyone to get started, even Paypal happily accept you into their arms (this wasn’t the case in the early days).

You can plug straight in with a turnkey competition website, with the creators advertising “you’ve seen others running these competitions … why don’t you?”

Selling the dream of running a comp site and making loads of money.

The reality is far from that.

What they don’t tell you is how hard it is to actually gain trust, to actually sell prizes out and how much you will need to spend on advertising (high 6 figures, sometimes 7 figs a month) to make a decent go at building a legitimate and long term comp business.

This leaves many sites struggling to actually get started, they’ve got a flash website with all the bells and whistles but no knowhow on how to actually get it going. This is when they get stuck, comps don’t sell out, they bleed money and end up fizzling out. Whether or not customers take on the brunt of that I don’t know, this is the first I’ve heard of a comp site not paying out a bigger prize.

After this morning’s news article and after a chat with a couple of the other early created comp site owners … we will be spearheading some sort of regulation in the new year.

We came in back in 2019 and made a difference for customers back then, we will make a difference again now.

The industry has grown phenomenally since the early days and it’s about time the whole sector was regulated to ensure safe playing for customers across the UK and Ireland … wherever they decide to play.

Millions of people are parting with their hard earned cash expecting to receive the prize if they win.

I will personally tackle this in the new year, alongside a few of the bigger sites, to get some sort of regulation in place to stop situations like Dafydd has found himself in from happening again.

Merry Christmas Rev Heads!