Player Protection & Fair Draw Code

Competitions are open only to adults aged 18 or over who are resident in the United Kingdom and meet the published eligibility requirements.

Entrants must pass a 5-question skill quiz by answering at least 3 questions correctly before creating a paid online entry. The free postal route does not require the quiz.

A free postal entry route is available for every competition until its closing date. No purchase or skill-question quiz is required to enter by post.

Send one individual postcard or letter, carrying its own valid First Class or Second Class postage, to Crown & Eagle Competitions, 6, East Grove Road, Newport, NP19 9QG. The whole entry must be handwritten and must clearly state your full name, home address, date of birth, contact email, phone number, the exact three-character competition code shown on the competition tile, and this statement: “I agree to the Customer Agreement and Privacy Policy of Crown & Eagle Competitions.”

You may send any number of postal entries, but each entry must be sent separately under its own stamp.

Handwriting is required by default to prevent automated entry abuse. If a recognised disability or physical condition makes handwriting impossible, email [email protected] before posting. We record the adjustment against the email address only, without requesting diagnosis or medical details. Once recorded, typed or printed physical entries from that email address are permitted until you ask us to remove the adjustment or the related account is deleted. All other rules still apply.

Valid entries
An entry is valid only if it meets every requirement above. Bulk entries, multiple entries in one envelope, incomplete or illegible entries, entries without the statement, and entries from anyone under 18 or anyone not resident in the United Kingdom will be rejected. If an account already exists for the supplied email address, the entrant's full name and date of birth must match that account. A mismatch will be rejected. An entry linked to an account that is restricted, or in a time-out or self-exclusion period, will also be rejected. If no account exists for the supplied email address, an internal guest record will be created. An invalid entry is rejected whenever it arrives.

Closing date for postal entries
We judge a postal entry by the date and time we receive it, not by its postmark or the date it was posted. An entry must reach us by the advertised closing date and time of the competition it names.

A valid entry that reaches us by the closing date is allocated one random remaining ticket in that competition. If every ticket has already been allocated, the entry goes into the Postbox Prize Draw instead. A valid entry that reaches us after the closing date is not entered into any draw: we log it, email the entrant to tell them, and securely shred it. A late entry is turned away because of when it arrived, which is separate from an entry rejected as invalid.

Postal entries do not reserve tickets while in transit. We are not responsible for postal delays. Processed postal entries have the same chance of winning as paid entries.

If the competition sells out
When a competition closes early because every ticket has been allocated, each valid postal entry for it that reaches us by its advertised closing date is entered into the Postbox Prize Draw for the month in which we record it. We email the entrant to confirm this. The Postbox Prize Draw is a separate, free monthly competition with its own Postbox Prize Draw terms.

Accepted physical correspondence is stored by the competition code to which the ticket was allocated and securely shredded 60 days after the final accepted winner is found, unless a legal hold requires longer retention. Postbox Prize Draw correspondence is stored by month and securely shredded 60 days after the final accepted winner for that month is found. Rejected and late correspondence is counted by reason and securely shredded promptly without retaining its personal details.

Card payments are processed by a third-party, PCI-DSS compliant payment processor, whether by redirect to its own secure payment page or via payment fields it hosts within our checkout.

Payment authorisation alone does not issue tickets. Tickets are created only after a confirmed-payment notification, and they are withdrawn if the payment later fails, is cancelled, reversed, refunded, disputed or charged back.

No single paid checkout or basket checkout may exceed GBP 250 after ticket-volume and promotion discounts, but before Account Credit or Sovereigns are applied.

Customers may choose either a daily or monthly spending limit. If no user-selected limit exists, the website applies a default daily limit of GBP 20.

Lower limits apply immediately. Increases or removals take effect only after a 24-hour cooling-off period.

Customers can apply a 1-day, 7-day, 30-day or custom time-out. Customers may also request a longer self-exclusion period, including a period of at least 6 months, by contacting [email protected].

During a time-out or self-exclusion, customers may still log in and view account, legal and support pages, but cannot enter competitions.

Every ticket is a separate, individually recorded entry: a purchase of more than one ticket, and every approved free postal entry, each receive their own entry record with its own equal chance of winning. No entry is weighted, ranked or given priority over any other.

Winners are selected using PHP's random_int function, a cryptographically secure random number generator (CSPRNG). At the point of the draw, every eligible entry for that competition is placed into a fixed, ordered list, and random_int generates a single random position within that list; the entry at that position wins. Prizes are awarded strictly in accordance with the laws of chance: the selection is entirely automated and no manual choice, weighting or ranking is applied at any stage.

Following approval of the final winner from the manual draw, the system sends a commiserations email to every non-winning entrant, including postal guest records. Failed result emails remain recorded for administrator retry.

The moment prize payment or fulfilment is confirmed by an administrator, a permanent record card containing the competition, draw details and winner reference appears on the public Recent Winners page.

Paid entries and approved free postal entries have an equal, ticket-for-ticket chance of winning.

The public draw audit may show the draw ID, timestamp, generated random number or random position, total valid entries, winning reference where appropriate, eligible entries hash and randomisation method.

The website may maintain administrative audit logs and operational records to support security, fraud prevention, dispute resolution, responsible play, system administration and legal compliance.

Customers can submit complaints using the Complaints page or contact [email protected].

The player protection, transparency and free entry route measures on this page have been developed with regard to the UK Government's Voluntary Code of Good Practice for Prize Draw Operators, published by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). The Code sets out expectations for prize draw and competition operators on player protection, transparency and accountability.

You can read the full Code on the UK Government website: Voluntary Code of Good Practice for Prize Draw Operators.

Competitions are not operated as instant-win products. The website should not pressure customers to spend and customers should enter only for entertainment and only with money they can afford to spend.

The website may maintain administrative audit logs and operational records to support security, fraud prevention, dispute resolution, responsible play, system administration and legal compliance. These records may include payment totals, refunds, quiz pass and fail statistics, question performance, blocked Player Protection limit attempts, suspended-account attempts and draw audit records.